Le Couperet et Le Collet
by silvercistern
Summary: "I must say, it is quite rare to find a Tribute for whom being reaped was only the second most dreadful thing to happen to her on Reaping Day." The story of how Johanna Mason lost her family, and what she ended up finding on the other side. - on hiatus... probably abandoned. This was the first thing I wrote for thg fandom, and it's desperate for a rewrite.
1. Prologue: May The Odds

"It's all about finding that sweet spot," Elsa Mason told her sixteen-year-old daughter. It was the morning of the Reaping, and they were surveying a particularly enormous old pine that seemed nearly impossible to fell. "Once you've found that, and start a good rhythm goin' the ol' sumbitch will be leanin' in no time flat."

Johanna raised her eyebrow and scoffed, "Momma, you are a liar. You've just got to chop it till it goes. Doesn't matter where, as long as you cut out a wedge and make sure it will fall in the right direction."

Without warning, Elsa's lean, muscled arm flexed, and one of the small hatchets she always carried in a strap around her thigh was quivering in the tree. "Oh, you think so, brainless?" She grinned at her daughter with her crooked smile, deep brown eyes twinkling madly, daring her.

Johanna cracked a matching smile and threw her own axe. It struck deep about a foot lower than her mother's and vibrated from the impact for much, much longer.

"See there? How long that wiggled around down there? That's the sweet spot. We'll get it down in no time, and then you can make me some breakfast." Pulling the small axes out of the tree, she took the larger one strapped to her back and started chopping away.

Johanna looked at her quizzically, "Can't we just use the crosscut? The axe is gonna take about a million years, and I'm hungry."

"If you want to be here all morning and get a face full of sawdust we can. This is classier, dummy. An elegant solution. Use the tree's own weight to bring it on down. A good lumberjack doesn't waste energy. Life's hard enough as it is – might as well use your brain just a bit to make it easier, hm? Let things take care of themselves. They do that, if you push them the right way."

Reaping mornings were always like this. They cut down the biggest tree they could find, made note of it to the foreman, and came home with enough money to buy a small feast for the two of them. It wasn't much money, really, but it was always nice to get some bacon from the butcher, fresh bread from the baker, about a dozen eggs, and, the most important part, an entire bar of chocolate to share. Years later, Johanna realized that her mother had to be doing something more than chopping down trees to get that chocolate, but she never found out what it was.

After swinging her axe for what seemed like a very short time, Elsa stepped aside and gave her daughter a chance to attack the tree. They were nearly the same height now, with wavy brown hair, and wide-set brown eyes so similar that most people thought they were sisters. It made sense – Elsa was only just thirty.

Falling pregnant at fourteen was a death sentence for most District 7 women. No one knew who Johanna's father was, and Elsa never would say. The rumor was that she didn't know her own self, there had been so many who could have been. The rumors were always mixed in with pitying glances – the young girl had been orphaned so suddenly when the previous winter's whooping cough had spread through the camp. It was no surprise, suddenly living with the half-blind, mostly-crazy Old Man Mason, who fed them with her tesserae and little else, that the girl had needed some kind of comfort. No one thought she'd make it through labor, let alone feed herself, the old man, and the baby.

But when little Johanna came screaming into the world, Elsa did not die. She didn't even cry. She just signed up for another tesserae, came home from school every day, strapped the baby to her back, and hiked into the forest to chop down trees. Lumber quotas were quotas, and the foremen were always looking for ways to fill them, despite regulations. They were also interested in other things that Elsa was quite willing to give them for a fair price. So trees came down, the quotas were filled, and she did what she needed to to feed her baby. Johanna's first lullaby was the steady thump of the axe as it buried itself in a tree.

The odds had been in Elsa Mason's favor – she was never called up in the Reaping, despite having her name in the drawing fifteen times her last year. She never managed to end up pregnant again, either.

But they weren't with her that morning as her baby girl confidently drew back the old axe only to feel a sudden jerk as the axehead came loose from the shaft. The thick blunted end flew through the air, slamming heavily into the base of Elsa's skull.

Hours later, Johanna Mason was called up in the Reaping, but she wasn't there. The Peacekeepers pulled her from her mother's side as the healers desperately tried to relieve the pressure of blood on Elsa's brain. She was publicly whipped before she was put on the train. There wasn't a moment to say goodbye to anyone, or even to take a token that reminded her of home. She didn't know what she would have taken anyway.

She never did get breakfast.


	2. Prologue: Be Ever

Her mentor was named Needles. He was the very young, unassuming Victor from about five years prior – the first Victor from District 7 in many years, and the only one willing to mentor the hysterical, trembling girl. Johanna couldn't remember how he'd won, or how old he had been when he had. But she didn't have time to think about that in-between the violent bouts of vomiting, the near-constant panic attacks, the sleepless nights, and the nightmares. The Capital doctor on the train repaired the shredded skin on her back right away, but he wouldn't give her anything strong for the pain. Too unstable. He was certain she'd kill herself with morphling.

Needles would sit on the edge of her bed and stroke her hair for hours, chanting to her in a low soft voice in a language that she didn't understand, a language only a scattered few of District 7 knew. He was trying to keep her from hurting herself, but she did not even know why. She did not even know the name of the other tribute. She just wept until exhaustion overtook her then woke with her eyes already full of tears.

The last night of the train ride, she stopped crying. Her kidneys ached. Her eyes were so heavy and swollen that it took enormous effort to open them. On top of that, her eyelids stuck together. Her hands shook. But she stopped crying.

"I killed my mother," she said when she could finally sit up.

The low light coming in the window made jagged lines on Needles' angular features. He looked older than he was. He looked ancient.

"Your mother is still alive. For now."

Johanna said nothing for a very long time. "She'll die. Or, at least, she'll never be the way she was. I killed her."

The light died as the train went underground in its final approach to the Capital.

"I can kill anyone now."

* * *

><p>Her stylist was an idiot, and dressed them like trees. Not even the sort of trees that grew in District 7, but a strange sort of willow that Johanna had never even seen. The long streams of drooping branches from the headpieces of her and her fellow tribute, James, kept getting tangled. They almost fell off of the chariot. People laughed. Johanna cried. It was easy to cry now, but it wasn't real anymore. Inside all she felt was a cold, heartless rage.<p>

When she trained in front of the other tributes, she clumsily dropped the axe, spilled the camouflage dyes, and tripped over the snares. The Careers laughed at her, and the terrified tributes from other districts pitied her. The half-starved tributes from District 12, of all places, pitied her. When it came her turn to perform for the Gamemakers, she picked up the weapon she knew the least about, the bow, and tried to hit a target. For someone who had never touched a bow in her life, she had done fantastically, but the Gamemakers didn't care much.

When she stood in a dark green dress in front of a purple-haired Caesar Flickerman, she faked a panic attack. He had her carried off the stage in hysterics.

Her Capital chaperone, a flamboyant orange-haired man whose name she didn't bother remembering, left her alone. James and his mentor, a much older man named Anders, left her alone. The avoxes, servants, and Capitol workers left her alone. She was the sad, cowardly tribute from District 7. With the exception of Annie Cresta no one had ever unnerved Capital sensibilities so much. At least Annie had had the decency to lose self-respect and sanity _after _she had started the Games.

In the seclusion of her room, Johanna worked, doing hours and hours of push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups. Needles quizzed her on what was safe to eat, how to make a fire, how to tie a knot. He showed her how to use the items she had: wood, sap, cloth, grass, to make water skins, snares, and even small weapons. When she refused to sleep, he danced his fingers across her body until everything was forgotten in bittersweet oblivion. In the quiet moments afterwards, between sleep and awake, he told her how he had begun sculpting after his Games, he told her his real name and made her promise to keep it secret. He told her he was nineteen. He told her he had won by keeping quiet. He told her she would win. He told her he would care for her mother if she didn't. He never kissed her.

As she prepared to leave the morning of the Games, he slipped a leather cord around her wrist. There was a tiny pinecone attached. The sort that looked like nothing, and eventually became the most enormous tree in the forest. The meaning was not lost on her. More than that, it smelled like home. It smelled like her mother.

For a singular moment, Johanna allowed herself the luxury of real tears. Standing on her tiptoes, she kissed him softly.

"Needles is the dumbest name I have ever heard," she whispered against his lips, and then turned and walked to her doom.


	3. Prologue: In Your Favor

The arena was a pine forest. It rained constantly. She was in her element. Food was not an issue, nor was water. Using her shirt and the sap, she fashioned herself a water skin which could be easily unwrapped to catch the abundant rainwater. Edible nuts and berries had been pathetically easy to find. The Gamemakers ignored her – her Reaping had made everyone in the Capitol uncomfortable, and everyone just wanted to see as little footage of her as possible.

She hid herself well, waiting as the Careers chipped away at the tributes that remained after the bloodbath. James was killed immediately as he struggled to get an axe. The first day, there were fourteen. Every night, a new face appeared in the sky. Twelve. Ten. Nine. Finally, she saw them for the first time. They cornered the female tribute from District 12, a shivering little thing with eyes the size of dinner plates. Eyes that had looked at her with pity at the training center. They killed her slowly while Johanna watched unseen from a tree. At least, she had thought she was unseen. In the last moments, those enormous eyes found her, and stared, unblinking, while the girl's intestines were slowly pulled out and examined by the stunningly gorgeous, shockingly sadistic girl from One. Even the other Careers were disgusted, and they began to argue. In the resulting scuffle, none of them noticed as the dying girl pulled two axes from a backpack that lay on the ground, and, with a reserve of energy that seemed impossible, hid them under her body.

But Johanna noticed.

The girl's enormous eyes took forever to glaze over with death. But they never left Johanna's. The girl from One began to berate the boy from Four, and the pack moved on before the cannon even fired.

Johanna slithered down the tree and crept towards the dying girl as her body began to seize and then fell still. Assuming she was gone, Johanna reached for the hafts of the axes. Before she could pull them out completely, her elbow was caught in the dying grip of the Twelve girl. Cracked lips moved and a voice that barely sounded human croaked, "Make her beg to die ."

Johanna pulled the axes free and loosed herself from the dying girl's grasp. Almost casually, she threw the smaller axe into a nearby tree where it quivered for ages. The sweet spot.

"Babygirl, she's gonna scream for it."

The cannon fired.

* * *

><p>The Careers killed the Amazonian beauty from Eleven, the brilliant girl from Three, and the sullen but handsome boy from Five before she caught up with them again. She listened and watched, concealed in a hollow log, as they cautiously looked each other over, realizing that there was no one left. No one but them, and her. It had stopped raining.<p>

"Seven is probably starving herself to death in a tree somewhere," the boy from Four offered. "We should find her before we split up."

One looked at him with pure malice in her violet eyes, and began to prowl around him slowly in a circle. "Is that what Finnick told you to do? Wait until we're down to the last tribute and stab us in the back? You know as well as I do that no matter which one of us is left, killing the mouse is going to be no problem. You saw her. She can't even walk straight without falling. No. We're splitting up now. Or, actually-"

Without waiting to hear another word, the other girl from Four, and the boy from Two turned and blindly ran.

"Actually," One continued, "I'm going to save myself some effort and kill you now."

Four had about six inches and seventy pounds on the girl from one, with long, lithe whipcord muscles built from years of swimming. He held two long daggers that curved wickedly on the ends. He rotated them around his wrists like someone who had played with them as a baby.

But One carried an assortment of weapons on her person, from an enormous bludgeon to a skinny dirk she had used to eviscerate the girl with the enormous grey eyes. She had weapons she could throw, weapons she could use hand-to-hand. And she had displayed proficient use of all of them over the course of the past few days.

With those odds, Four ran for it. Unfortunately he ran right into Johanna's log, shattering it with the force of his retreat. She spilled out into the open, and both of the Careers stopped for a moment, regarding her, as she curled into a ball and wept. Four collected himself and began to run again.

One took a moment longer to survey the situation, but followed her quarry away into the forest calling, "See you soon, little mouse!"

"Yeah. See you soon," for the first time since the morning of the Reaping, Johanna smiled.

* * *

><p>She found the copper-haired girl from Four trying to bring down a rabbit with a bow she did not know how to use. She didn't waste time: a flick of the arm was all it took to place an axe deep in the girl's back. The cannon echoed across the arena as Johanna pulled the axe free and wiped it clean on the grass. A bit of blood dripped onto her finger.<p>

She used it to draw a diagonal stripe under her right eye.

* * *

><p>The blonde boy from Two was bending over a stream to fill his water bottle. The hovercraft dipped down twice – the second time for the head that slowly bobbed downstream.<p>

Two stripes.

* * *

><p>The boy from Four was more difficult. Thinking that the girl from One was slowly annihilating the Careers, he crept through the underbrush silently, desperate to find his adversary first. Johanna trailed him for hours, waiting for him to drop his guard, even for a moment. But he wouldn't. He didn't stop to rest, to eat, to drink, to piss – just watched and waited.<p>

She had to do something.

Stumbling through the undergrowth, she tripped over a root and fell on her face. Once on the ground, she curled herself into the fetal position and audibly wept. Anyone in a quarter mile radius could hear – the forest was so quiet.

He felt ashamed that his only real kill was to be this pathetic girl who had started at such an enormous disadvantage. As he prepared his dagger to slit her throat, he even pitied her – an emotion that made him extremely uncomfortable. But it did not last.

Johanna rolled over and drove the hatchet into his chest.

He looked… surprised.

Johanna winked at him, "You were right you know. You should have come after me. At least you'll die knowing you had the moral victory."

And he did.

Three stripes.

* * *

><p>The girl from One was in the throes of a terror the likes of which she had never known. She paced in a large copse covered in soft pine needles. There was nowhere she could go to get away from the endless trunks of pine trees. She had been hearing things from the fucking awful things for hours – half-discernible whispers, out of tune snippets of old songs, and, worst of all, soft, girlish giggling. Somehow, everyone was dead but the mouse. She expected whatever terror that managed to easily dispatch her fellow careers to come at any minute. She expected muttations of the worst kind – horrors that would consume half of her body before she had a chance to die. And she waited, and waited – each moment growing more frantic.<p>

She did not expect the mouse to jump down from the trees, shirtless with three streaks of dried blood painted ceremonially under her eye.

For reasons her lizard brain understood well before her rational mind did, her blood ran cold. She tripped, falling backwards and scattering her weapons. In that moment, the mouse's axe was suddenly protruding from her stomach. She tried to stand and fight, but she couldn't feel anything below the axe.

"I've got a message for you from Twelve, bitch," the mouse said.

With practiced ease, Johanna chopped the sadistic girl from One apart, piece by piece. It took her ages to die, and the silent woods echoed her begging screams.

Four stripes.


	4. Prologue: Victor

As the hovercraft carried her out of the arena, Johanna demanded to see her mother more and more violently until the Capitol doctors forcefully sedated her with morphling. She slept undisturbed for three days straight. The bed was warm and soft. Her sleep was blissfully dreamless, a rarity among the drugged.

When she finally woke, she was surprised to find Finnick Odair sprawled across the couch in her ensuite sitting room like some sort of benign but expectant fertility god. She decided to let him stew and sat on a nearby chair. With a grunt, she began shoving chocolate truffles into her mouth from a delicate pink glass candy dish. He raised his eyebrows appreciatively as he watched her eat more sloppily than seemed humanly possible.

"Word on the street is you are sleeping with your mentor, JoJo," was the first thing he said.

Johanna made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat. She tried not to blush, but she had just chopped someone to pieces. She had just been knocked out for an indeterminately long period of time. She didn't know if her mother was alive or dead. Her feelings were a little raw at the moment. Her cheeks turned a delicate shade of pink.

"Almost but not quite, pretty boy," she finally responded, but her words lacked their usual vim and bravado and they both knew it. Something in the way the Capitol's favorite toy was addressing her made her feel unbearably vulnerable. She had seen him on the broadcasts. She knew his reputation. This frank honesty was not what she had expected at all. It was overwhelming, especially since all she wanted to know was if her mother was alive, sane, and safe. The only person who could tell her was conspicuously absent, and the last person she expected was in his place.

Finnick laughed mirthlessly.

"He's not allowed to see you, you know."

She looked at him quizzically. The burning fear she had expected but never experienced in the arena suddenly roared to life.

"What are you doing here?" the words smacked out of her mouth, dry and sticky with chocolate and trepidation.

Finnick sat up and pushed himself forward until his face was inches from hers. The simpering broadcasters hadn't been exaggerating when they claimed his eyes were as wild as the sea. "If you haven't made love to your boy, I'd suggest you attend to it rather quickly." His voice was casual, jovial even. His eyes screamed frantic urgency.

With every ounce of her being, Johanna tried to act disinterested, or even disgusted. But she couldn't. Her shock, fear and, most of all, _confusion_ at what the most desired man in Panem was unsuccessfully trying to make her understand left her feeling entirely too exposed.

"What? Why?" she found herself whispering, removing any semblance of her invulnerability.

Finnick leaned back into the couch, put his arms behind his head and gazed at the ceiling, "Let's just say that quite soon you might find the Capitol _unrelenting _in its distractions." For a single moment, he looked back at her with years of sorrow in his eyes. Then he blinked and the more familiar glazed and lazy look from the broadcasts was back.

"Thrilling as this has been, little butcher, I've got an appointment with a simply delicious little fashion designer who won't take no for an answer. I understand your interview is tonight. I'd suggest a nice stroll on the roof before you go. It always helped me to clear my head."

Leaving, he distracted the Capitol attendant with a wink, which left the door unattended long enough for Johanna to sneak away.

* * *

><p>Needles was sitting in the garden, surrounded by wind chimes with his head in his hands.<p>

"These stupid things are really noisy," Johanna started to say.

He was up, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and lifting her off the ground before she could fully close her mouth. He buried his face in her hair. It was an extremely awkward position, but he didn't seem to mind.

"You won," she heard him whisper in what sounded uncomfortably similar to horror-tinged awe. "I can't believe you won."

It was difficult to speak; her face was pushed into his chest. She made a muffled noise, trying to ask the question that was burning her mind from the inside out.

Needles answered before she could even form words. "Still alive. In a coma. She needs the best in Capitol doctors, surgery, and medicines. It will all be incredibly expensive, but I think she can make it." While her heart wept with joy and fear at the news, she kept it to herself. She focused on the way his voice was trembling, as though he was trying to hold himself together. It bothered her for a reason she could not define.

"Conveniently, I just won the Hunger Games," she said, getting a mouthful of shirt.

She felt his body stiffen almost imperceptibly. Taking that as her cue, she wiggled out of his arms and sat on the soft grass. "You're disgusted by the way I won." They could talk about her slaughtering of four young lives instead, keeping the thoughts of her mother alive safe and secure in the back corner of her mind.

He wouldn't look in her eyes as he crouched next to her and took her hand. "I'm disgusted by the way anyone wins."

"Not Annie. She didn't kill anyone." She added bitterly, "That must be real comforting."

He was silent. It infuriated her. How dare he. How dare anyone. She had not asked for this. She hadn't trained for years to murder, unlike every single person she had killed. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the Games, yet she had survived thanks to her wits, and the unexpected kindness of a dying girl. There was no one in the world who could judge her after what had happened.

"Don't expect me to justify myself to you."

He shook his head. "No, no, Johanna, you don't ever have to justify yourself to anyone ever again. Especially not me." He looked at her, and his eyes were desperate. He raised his hand to touch her cheek.

This was getting too intimate.

"Finnick Odair told me to have sex with you as soon as possible."

Needles' throat clenched hard enough to swallow a whole goose egg. "I…"

"He showed up in my room like he owned the place, sent me up to take a "nice stroll" and here you are. They won't let me see you for some reason. I haven't seen anyone, actually. In case the past few weeks of hell weren't a sufficient indication, I'm not an idiot. What is going on?"

He stammered again. Gone was the strong presence who had held her on the train.

"Pull yourself together and tell me!" she was on her feet, shouting.

He ran his hands through his hair, pulling at the ends as though he had to yank the words from his body. "There's no such thing as a Victor, Johanna."

"And that makes you what, exactly?"

"A survivor. A desperately _lucky_ survivor," his voice was so low she could barely hear him over the wind chimes. She made up for it by shouting at the top of her lungs.

"And Finnick and Annie and Blight and Anders and that drunk from Twelve and that creepy old lady from Four and all of those other crazy Victors from One and Two? Are they "survivors" too?"

"I don't even think I would call what Finnick and Haymitch do surviving."

"Then what is it?"

His eyes were wild as he looked to his left and right, as though he expected someone to jump out of the trellis that surrounded them.

She grabbed his shoulders and began to shake him, "Tell me! Just tell me, whatever it is, you pathetic ass!"

He never had a chance to say. The door to the rest of the building slammed open, and an entire contingent of Peacekeepers swarmed onto the roof, followed by her frantic escort. His orange hair was a disheveled mess, and there was a line of blood dripping from his right nostril. Two of the Peacekeepers grabbed her and pulled her towards the door. She briefly saw one that remained pull back the butt of his gun and slam it into Needles' skull.

* * *

><p>Her prep team and stylist were merciless in their preparations. They put her in a shimmering green dress that attempted to tastefully mirror her "shirtless look" in the arena, which was now apparently a fad in the Capitol. She wanted to ask who thought it were possible to look classy in a rag wrapped in a spiral around her, just barely covering her breasts and ass, but she couldn't open her mouth without getting her tongue coated in makeup. The stylist bewailed the fact that Beauty Base Zero never worked at smoothing out those pesky whip scars. Johanna smiled in spite of herself.<p>

She was shuttled to the broadcast area and prepared for the Victor's chair when she saw Needles. Though someone had tried very hard to hide it, his eyebrow had been violently split. It was sewn back together with the tiniest of stiches, but she noticed them. His skin was white and drawn, despite his makeup. He looked like a man going to his death.

Her prep team was called out, then her escort, then her stylist. They all fawned under the applause. Seven won rarely enough that they knew they needed to appreciate this attention for a long time coming. And there was quite a lot of it. After the Annie Cresta disaster of last year and the Titus disappointment of two years previous, the crowd was pleased with a Hunger Games that had a real, decisive winner.

When they called Needles, he walked on to the stage to thunderous applause, looking as though he would faint at any moment. They assumed her trickery had been his idea. They loved him for it. It was such an incredibly clever plan from the man who had won his Hunger Games simply by not freezing to death. Oh. She had remembered. Finally. That was how he had won, just like he said: by being quiet. Staying still. Keeping warm. Just like Annie Cresta, Needles McCallister hadn't killed a single person.

It was in that moment that she realized what he had done. She realized why he had volunteered as her mentor.

He had been certain that she was going to die in the arena.

He pitied her and in his pity, he had allowed himself to be the self-appointed guide to her death. He had never for one second believed she could win. He didn't _want _her to win. It was a surprise to her, but she couldn't bring herself to be angry with him over it. The look in his haunted eyes as he shook hands with President Snow told her all she needed to know about his life as a Victor. He was cowed. Defeated. Destroyed. Needles had tried to give her a few moments of peace and courage so she could die with grace instead of being slaughtered by the Capitol either quickly within the arena or slowly outside of it. But she had been too damn stupid to die.

She bit down hard on her lip until the blood flowed freely from multiple lacerations. She coated her nail, and drew four thin red diagonal lines under her right eye. She didn't suck on her lip to staunch the bleeding – she just let it run down her chin across her throat and into the valley between her breasts. The shimmery fabric of her dress pulled the thin trail of blood in a delicate spiral around her body.

When she walked on to the stage, the crowd fell silent.

This was what a Victor looked like.


	5. Three Years Later

**Part One: Finnick**

The phone was ringing for the fifth time in a row when Johanna finally climbed off of the couch to pick it up. She didn't really want to talk to anyone right now, but she knew that unless she answered it, the phone would continue to ring every two minutes until she picked it up or took it off the hook.

"What do you _want_, Finnick? "

"I'm well, Jojo. Thanks for asking," she could hear him grinning all the way from District Four. "How often do you make a fool of yourself, always assuming it's me?"

"The only two people who ever call me are you and Snow, and I don't think he likes me anymore."

There was a very long, very heavy silence. Then Finnick started laughing hysterically, sending long, loud barks over the phone line. He laughed like he hadn't really laughed in ages. It made her smile in spite of herself. He always managed to do that somehow, worming his way into her life until it was difficult to imagine a time when he hadn't been around.

"You assume I still like you," he said when he finally stopped laughing long enough to form words.

"I assume you're trying to get in my pants." She leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor. This was probably going to be a fairly long conversation. It always was. She might as well get comfortable. Snuggling her bare legs into the long shirt she wore, she began to twist the phone cord around her fingers distractedly.

"Maybe if you ever actually wore any."

This was the Finnick she really liked. The one who apparently had cameras installed in her house. The one who was laughing once more, at his own joke this time, like he was definitely the most hilarious person on the planet.

"Is there a reason for this call other than to get on my nerves?" In typical Odair fashion, he had continually insisted on calling her the one day that she most definitely did not ever want to speak to anyone.

There was a barely perceptible shift in his voice as laughter died away completely. It was unlike him to stop trying to cheer her up this quickly. "I was just calling to see what you thought of this year's Reaping. You know, wanted to catch up before I go to the Capitol. I'm not mentoring this year, so I couldn't take the train, but a hovercraft is coming soon. Also, wondering how your talent was coming along."

Johanna folded bits of paper into complicated shapes. Once they were finished, lovely and perfect, she usually tried to pin them onto a wall with her axe. It was a fairly sad excuse for a talent. Bringing it up was… well, it had never happened before, so she had to assume it meant something pretty significant, rather than an attempt to get her to ask about his poetry.

"Eh, I have a nasty papercut – no artistic endeavors for me until that heals," she responded with a longing and regret in reference to beautiful things that she had become incredibly adept at faking whenever she went to the Capitol. She paused, as if she needed to think about the one thing that today, having repeated itself in her mind almost a dozen times already, merited no additional consideration. "I thought this year's seemed okay. Ours aren't gonna get far, I don't think. Glad Blight and Anders are handling things so I can stay here." There was more that she thought, especially about how incredibly young twelve-year-old girls tended to look when confronted with death matches, but she kept that to herself.

Even more uncharacteristically, Finnick appeared to have no thoughts about the Reaping at all. He quickly changed the subject, despite having asked the question in the first place. "I have some ideas for a sort of paper flower that I think you will just _adore_. It's a shame you won't be there, really, so I can show you." His voice had taken on the bored, haughty tone that somehow managed to be enthusiastic and disingenuous all at the same time. She knew it all too well. To the Capitol, this _was_ Finnick Odair. "Actually, you know, Plutarch Heavensbee owes me quite a significant favor. I'm sure he'd be willing to pick you up in his personal hovercraft. You know, as a Games consultant like me. You are, after all, one of the more memorable Victors." Something was definitely going on. She had to make this conversation seem as innocuous as possible.

She giggled, "Not as memorable as some people I could think of..." She was flirting with him. And giggling. She hoped whoever was assigned the riveting task of listening in on their conversations was enjoying this.

His voice dropped an octave and took on a provocative, arrogant, absolutely _revolting_ tone, "Well, no one ever is, really." It was difficult to prevent a sudden reemergence of this afternoon's breakfast. She distracted herself by trying to figure out why on earth Finnick would want her in the Capitol on her year off.

"Well, if it means I get to see the great Odair, I guess I can come to see the Games."

"Excellent!" his voice was genuinely pleased, a rare enough occurrence to convince her beyond a shadow of a doubt that something very serious was going on. "Expect a hovercraft sometime tomorrow morning. That means you need to wake up before noon." Just like that, he hung up.

"I only sleep in on Reaping Day," she said to the dead line, twisting the cord around her fingers till the tips were white.

* * *

><p>District Seven was unique among the Districts in that the inhabited parts migrated around the District proper on a regular basis. Seven was in a section of Panem that was vaguely known as "Northwest." But as it was only northwest of the Capitol, and, as they weren't exactly handing out maps, it was difficult to say exactly where Seven was in reference to anywhere else. Most everyone knew Four and Twelve were very far away south and east, respectively, but that was about it. The problem was, the main industry in Seven was lumber, and to get lumber, you had to have trees. Once cut down, they had to grow back. Someone smart had realized pretty quickly that deforesting an entire area meant it took significantly longer for worthwhile trees to grow back. So, with the exception of the smelly, miserable paper factory that workers were shipped to in shifts for a month at a time, District Seven was more of a gathering of camps than anything. Everyone and everything was moved to a different area every twenty-five years or so, following rail lines that had been set down strategically by the Capitol. Each time the transition happened, Victor's Village and the Justice Building were physically relocated to a central location among the collection of camps, the furthest reaches of each one within a half day's walk to the steps of the Justice Building. They brought enormous hovercrafts and engineers from Two and Three to orchestrate the process. Just to show that they could<p>

It had been right after one of these transitions that her grandparents had died. They had been forced to leave an arid region full of red-skinned pines that grew to enormous heights; relocated to the forest Johanna was familiar with - one full of cypress and cedars where it rained almost every day. The journey plus the change in climate had led to many outbreaks of disease. Apparently, it had been more important for the Capital to show the District Seven residents its skills in building relocation than it was to provide them with lifesaving vaccines and medicines.

Johanna's grandmother had been widely known as beautiful woman, enrapturing everyone she met with her grace and wit. Her grandfather was known to have been as ugly as his wife was attractive, but also to be a man who was always ready to lend a hand, and who could spin one hell of a story. They had been desperately in love with each other, and had been, in the small way that anyone could ever be in their world, incredibly happy. Johanna felt more love when she considered the District's memory of them than she had felt for her crazy great-grandfather who she had actually known, until he wandered off when she was five and never came back. Her grandparents had been rare, precious people according to anyone who had ever known them.

Johanna assumed they were probably better off dead.

It was dusk, and she sat in the middle of the cemetery that, in the near future when Seven relocated again, would be lost to human knowledge and reclaimed by the forest. In front of her were four small crosses made of pine branches. She didn't even know why a cross was meant to be on a grave, but that didn't stop her from climbing the tallest tree she could find every Reaping Day to cut branches for new ones.

Crosses for the graves of everyone she had loved.

Ignoring what Finnick had said that afternoon, she thought about the girl from Twelve who had volunteered. She thought about the girl from Eleven who hadn't had anyone to volunteer for her. The scars on her back burned and her heart ached in a way she rarely allowed. But there was a reason that this day was the day she came to the graveyard. Thinking about those kids distracted her from the memories that lived here long enough for her to clean away a year's worth of branches and leaves, to place the new crosses in a futile attempt to assign meaning to this place. She could have bought carved granite headstones from Two that would last, even if everyone forgot the cemetery was there. She could have paid a local man to care for the graves more regularly, and come visit once a month to say sweet words in memory of the people who had so clearly deserved them.

She didn't.

As she stood up to slowly walk home, she tried to focus on the Reaping. They were already calling the Career girl from Two "The Next Johanna Mason."The commentators claimed with insider knowledge that she was vicious, smart, and an expert when it came to throwing knives, just like Johanna had been. Johanna tried to throw the knife she carried into a nearby tree, only to have it ricochet back and nearly stick her in the leg. Of course, Capitol folk had never touched an axe or a real knife, so it wasn't surprising that they didn't know the significant difference between the two. She figured she could probably still kill the girl from Two anyway, or at least give her a run for her money. The thought didn't bother her so much. Her nightmares, after all, were never about the Games.

She dreamt of freezing to death that night, an axe clenched tight in her dying hand.

* * *

><p>When the hovercraft arrived the next morning she was chopping wood in her front yard. There was already a stack of it large enough to heat every house in Victor's Village for the entire winter. She knew that at least half of the pile would be gone by the time the first frost arrived. At least, she hoped it would be. The only way to be charitable in this damn place was to make sure that what she had was easily stolen. It was better that way. Being nice made her angry.<p>

She ignored the craft as it landed, knowing the pilot expected her to be eagerly waiting, suitcase in hand. Instead, he had to shut down the entire craft, disconnect himself from all of the various wires and straps, all to ask her if she was ready to go.

She hadn't even packed yet.

Cracking a grin at the thought, she felt the satisfying split of a particularly thick log.

"Miss Mason?" the pilot called to her from a safe distance. He was young, maybe twenty-two, and he looked terribly nervous as he watched her swing the axe. She tended to terrify people, especially young men. Finnick said they found it unnerving to be aroused by a woman whom they had also seen chop a living human into pieces. She said that they needed to restock their damn spank banks and get over themselves.

"I'm not ready yet," she hit the log so hard a piece of it embedded itself in the side of her house. "Need to pack."

The pilot gulped and responded as professionally as possible, "You need not worry about packing, Miss Mason. Mr. Heavensbee has been so kind as to purchase you an entire new wardrobe in the Capitol."

Well, this was new. Johanna loved clothes, even if she had a reputation for not wearing many of them.

"Yeah?" She lowered the axe and turned, a smile on her face.

Realizing that talking about clothes was an effective method to distance Johanna from her weapon, the pilot continued, his face turning as red as his hair as he tried to avoid looking at _her _clothing, which was rather minimal. "Indeed, yes! Mr. Heavensbee has recently taken great interest in the career of a talented pair of stylists. In fact, they are the newest stylists in this year's Games!"

Johanna's smile turned into a sneer, "If there's _one_ tree costume in there, I'm gonna to boycott clothes completely."

To his everlasting credit, the pilot swallowed quickly, and managed to respond coherently, "I believe that this wardrobe is more subdued and less stylized than that, Miss Mason."

"How do you know that? He showing them off to his whole flight crew?"

Unlike his previous responses, he answered this question like he really knew what to say, "I am not just Mr. Heavensbee's pilot, Miss Mason. I am also the manager of all of his personal affairs. He is a very busy man and cannot do everything at once."

"What's your name, kid?" she threw the haft of the axe at him to catch.

He was taken completely off guard, and barely caught it without doing serious damage to his own foot. "M-Marcus, Miss Mason."

"You're not half bad, Marcus. Now let's go take a look at my new clothes." Stomping over to the hovercraft, she let herself in and slammed the door behind her.

The first thing she realized was that Plutarch Heavensbee sure knew how to travel in style. The passenger compartment of the hovercraft was sumptuously decorated, in deep reds and oranges. Everything was soft and warm; exactly the opposite of what she had come to expect a hovercraft to be. There were small bowls filled with various delicacies sitting on almost every flat surface. Johanna threw herself into a plush red chair next to a bowl of chocolate covered nuts and fruits, then proceeded to eat every single one. The man himself looked on with a bemused grin on his homely face. He was large and as opulent as the interior of his hovercraft.

"Hungry?" he asked.

"Nah," Johanna replied with her mouth full, "these just taste real good." She looked out the window and watched Marcus standing awkwardly, turning her axe over and over in his hands, not sure what to do. He finally rested it against the woodpile, walked away, and then ran back to readjust it. He repeated the action four more times until he was satisfied. She smirked.

"Marcus is a highly competent employee, but he does tend to overthink things," Heavensbee raised his eyebrows, "especially when it comes to pretty girls."

Johanna snorted, "I don't think there are many people who would call me a "pretty girl" anymore, Heavensbee."

"Only because they've been taught to see you otherwise, Miss Mason. If I knew nothing of you, and saw you walking down the street looking in shop windows instead of, oh, I don't know, brazenly challenging everyone in your path to a staring contest that will end in death, as you usually do, I would think to myself that you were quite a pretty girl."

"What is the deal with everyone calling me "Miss Mason," today? It's Johanna. If everyone in the damn Capitol can call me by my first name, so can you. Also, "taught?" That's a pretty mild way to describe chopping a girl to pieces."

"And you've made it your goal to not show anyone a moment's weakness since then. You had quite a few ways to play the situation after the Games, and you chose something along the lines of "merciless harbinger of death." Not the route I would go personally, but it seems to have worked for you pretty well. They certainly love you in the Capitol."

"They fear me."

"People who have nothing real to distress them often enjoy feeling afraid, my dear girl."

Johanna was annoyed, "Stop treating me like I'm nice and proper. You're doing it to piss me off. You're calling me Miss Mason because you know I fucking hate it and you want me to lose it so I show my "true colors" or some complete idiocy like that."

Plutarch tilted his head and looked at her with an entirely new expression. She couldn't tell what it was, exactly, but she knew it was at least pleasant surprise.

"It's quite rare to see someone with insight like yours not using it to manipulate people into constantly giving her what she wants."

"Did you sleep through the Seventy First Hunger Games, _Mister_ Heavensbee?"

He was quiet for a long moment, as if coming to a very weighty decision. "There is a significant difference, my dear between **survival** and–" just like that, Plutarch began speaking rapidly about something completely different. She had never seen a sane person interrupt himself before, and it took a moment to catch up.

"Listen, Johanna, and listen well. We have five minutes to have the most important conversation of your life. I just initiated a program that interrupted the audio feed installed in this hovercraft for a short time. When I say this word," he held up a scrap of paper that said, "living" in clear block letters, "we are going to continue our previous conversation as though nothing has happened. Do you understand?"

"I– yes– I get it."

Plutarch leaned forward, his pale hazel eyes piercing and focused, and asked with a tone she found unreadable, "Tell me, Johanna. How much do you trust Finnick Odair?"

Her eyes grew cold and hard. "I'd trust him with my life. You'd better have a damn good reason for asking."

"Finnick feels the same way about you. That's why he asked you to come with me. Do you believe it?"

She recalled the sincere pleasure in Finnick's voice. So _this_ was why he had wanted to talk to her about paper cranes.

"Yes." Plutarch sighed with relief. Without Finnick, there was no way he would have been able to convince her, and they both were well aware of the fact.

"How much do you hate Coriolanus Snow, Johanna?"

Her mouth went dry and she could barely hear for the rushing in her ears. Everything was collapsing around her. It was cold. So cold. "How _much_?" she rasped out, worried he could hear her hyperventilating. No, no no, they would not talk about this.

"A better question: What would you give to make him pay for–" she lifted her hand menacingly, keeping him from the words that no one was allowed to say. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, trying to hold on to the moment.

She closed her eyes, but the feeling of nothingness, of desolate oblivion, inched closer. With extraordinary strength, she forced the visions away. Looking into Plutarch's dispassionate, inquiring face, her brown eyes black with a freezing, dead fury, she asked, "What would it take?"

"Your life. Your death. Your pride. Your sanity. I don't know what the days ahead are going to ask of you, or any of us."

She started to laugh, quietly at first, and then louder and louder until it echoed even in the heavily padded compartment. He sat quietly. If he was confused, distressed, or even pleased, he did not show it. Just an intense but composed interest.

"That's all? Plutarch, I'd say that's a damn good deal."

Plutarch smiled, "There is a significant difference, my dear, between survival and **living**."


	6. A Day in the Life of Finnick Odair

_With the high speed train still unusable because of some sort of weather condition that Johanna had never bothered to find out about, the train ride back to Seven had been even longer than the train ride to the Capitol had been, especially for the staff. She had been an unbearable terror; focused on her mother to the point of near madness. Never sleeping, she had paced the corridors, constantly checking to make sure that the Capitol medical staff she had acquired was still there. The two doctors and four nurses had been put off by her vigilance. H__aving __not even seen the patient yet, there was little they could do, but Johanna had expected them to be preparing. They had tried to look busy, reading all of the medical literature they could find, even things that were obviously not relevant to head trauma, but she was never satisfied._

_When she wasn't pacing, she had sat in a chair, folding fragments of paper over and over until they disintegrated in her fingers. It was in one of these moments that her escort came into the room and, in a rare display of insight, left a tiny folded paper box on the adjacent table. He had said nothing, just turned and left. She had picked up the fragile box and slowly unfolded it to see how it worked. The she recreated it. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally, it began to fall to bits. She had searched through the room, finding all of the paper she could, and set to making the same box over and over again. _

_That was how Needles found her; in a chair surrounded by dozens of little paper boxes, eyebrows knitted as she began yet another one. There were many that looked identical, but those closer to her had begun to display levels of variation, as she began to elaborate upon the original design. He thought she hadn't even registered his presence, until she suddenly spoke, not taking her eyes from the box she was working on._

"_Decided to crawl out of your room, eh?"_

_He nodded silently and picked up one of her more complicated creations. Of course, she wasn't looking, so he had to add, "I... couldn't before." As if that explained anything._

_There was a long silence._

"_What are you and Finnick Odair both so certain is going to happen to me?" she finally asked. _

_Needles closed his eyes, as if in pain. "I don't know," he honestly responded._

"_What happened to you?"_

_He laughed sadly. "Nothing, really. At least, nothing directly. No one found me interesting enough."_

"_Then why are you so afraid?" For the first time since he entered the room, she looked at him as he gazed out of the window. His angular face had become even more so from the stress of the past few days. Under his eyes were enormous dark circles. He had aged so much in a short time. _

"_Because, Johanna, you are so very, very interesting."_

* * *

><p>She stood in a closet filled with some of the most beautiful clothing she had ever seen. Behind her, Marcus, stood nervously rubbing his hands together. Before her stood a man with gold eyeliner and short, brown hair, who carried himself with more quiet strength than anyone she had ever met.<p>

This man was a _stylist_?

They were all in a closet in Finnick's luxurious Capitol penthouse – a location Johanna had always found excuses not to visit in the past. After dropping Plutarch off at some Gamemakers' meeting, Marcus had immediately brought her to see her clothing. It had been decided, without her consent or input, that Johanna would be staying with Finnick. In fact, the room was decorated as though it had been intended for her for quite some time. It smelled faintly of pine and rainwater.

"Cinna wanted an opportunity to design clothing for a Victor while he was working on the costumes for the tributes this year," Marcus volunteered while Johanna browsed.

With a wearied smirk, the stylist said, "To be honest, I needed something to work on that was outside of the realm of showmanship. I needed to make useful clothing that didn't have theatrical elements. If I just worked on all the showpieces for Twelve at once, I think it would have messed up the process."

"So you decided to make clothes for the Victor who hates to wear them as a fun little side project?"

Cinna stopped smiling, and looked at her seriously, "I like a challenge."

There was something in his words that made Johanna fall silent. She ran her fingers across the green silk of a dress, the sturdy white linen of a light blouse, and stopped at the soft black leather of a jacket. She pulled the garment off its hanger and slipped her arms into it. The leather was soft and pliable, but sturdy. She zipped it diagonally across her body, the leather forming snugly around the curves of her waist and breasts but not too tight for the broad spread of her shoulders. She rotated her arms and found no inhibition in her movements whatsoever.

She pushed past Marcus, who was gaping at her and stood in front of the mirror. The jacket looked as good as it felt. And just there, on her right shoulder, the leather had been sliced diagonally four times leaving the blood red fabric below exposed. Four stripes.

"This isn't half bad, boys."

Cinna bowed and Marcus grinned with boyish excitement, despite having nothing to do with the garment at all.

"Alright, alright, dress-up time is over. Cinna, the train from Twelve has arrived, and your prep team is already probably waxing that poor girl within an inch of her life," Johanna hadn't even noticed Finnick enter, but he was certainly making himself known now.

She turned angrily, "You're just gonna barge in? I'm trying on clothes in here!"

"Nothing all of Panem hasn't seen, JoJo," Finnick said shaking Marcus and Cinna's hands. He turned to her, "Plus, it's my house." He forced her into a hug that ended with both of them apparently trying to strangle the other on the floor, laughing all the while.

Cinna raised his eyebrows, and turned to leave, saying that he would see them all later in the evening at the Training Center, then closed the door behind him.

"Wait, what? We're going to the Training Center tonight?"

"Just a social call," Finnick responded vaguely. "Why don't you try on the rest of that lot? I want to see how clothes actually _look_ on you."

"When will you realize that you've beaten that joke to death and it's starting to smell?" Johanna asked, stripping down as she walked back into the closet.

For the second time in one day, Marcus turned an amazing shade of red.

* * *

><p>After trying on every single amazing item in the closest, Finnick took her to a Capitol restaurant for lunch. He had insisted she look elegant, so she had slid her feet into impossibly high Capitol heels and slithered into the green silk dress. It was dainty and feminine and altogether lovely, but in a show of defiance, the right shoulder of the fabric had been gathered to show four diagonal stripes. It was subtle, but it made Johanna feel strong. After over two years of mandatory Capitol visits that had followed her own Victory Tour, she was embarrassed to admit that she really needed the extra strength. Knowing the way people here scrutinized fashion, she was certain that her, or rather Cinna's, little piece of defiance did not go unnoticed.<p>

Never one for subtle, Finnick was dressed in some sort of gold Capitol monstrosity that showed off his physique but made his eyes and hair glimmer unnaturally. He smiled seductively at almost everyone they passed, and was asked to stop and sign autographs so often that she figured it'd be dinnertime when they finally ate lunch. The Capitol citizens glanced at her too, and whispered excitedly afterwards. With Finnick's reputation, she could easily imagine what they were saying. Victors hooked up, it was true, but never for long, and rarely so publicly.

As if to confirm the rumors, Finnick took her hand with a look that did not allow for arguments. She glared at him anyway. It felt uncomfortable, and her hand was sweating. She knew he'd mock her for it later.

"All this swagger, and you don't even know how to hold hands with a boy, JoJo," he said through his teeth, smiling and waving at a group of fuscia-haired teenagers who seemed to be walking some sort of dog. Or was it a cat? Or a rat? Were they making muttations into pets now?

In response, she gripped his hand so hard his fingers were nearly crushed. He might be good with the charm and the trident-stabbing, but no one's hands were as strong as someone who split wood for three hours every morning. "Guess not," she said sweetly, holding on a good thirty seconds more before she let him rub the feeling back into his fingers.

The restaurant was incredibly crowded, and almost unbearably loud. It was not surprising, being right on the route of the tributes' parade. People who wanted to get a seat came here at dawn, or paid someone to do it for them. The resulting crowd had to get food somewhere. But despite how packed it was, two Victors had no difficulty getting a table on a high balcony overlooking the street. The waiter apologized that the video and audio feeds in the restaurant were down and explained that they would have to order food the old-fashioned way. Finnick smiled winningly, and said that it was no matter, in fact, it was perfect. Only this smile was enthusiastic and real. Without even asking Johanna's opinion, he told the waiter exactly what to bring them. To her great annoyance, it was exactly what she wanted to eat.

"So, you hauled me all the way out here to show me some plant made out of paper?" she leaned one arm over the back of her chair and gazed out at the frenetic menagerie of insanity that was the Capitol on the day the tributes arrived.

When she turned back around, he was holding out a delicate paper flower with four petals. "It's a primrose."

The reference was not lost on Johanna. She raised her eyebrows warily, "Can we–?"

"Yeah, it's safe to talk here. I know the owner. His feeds go down pretty regularly, when we need them to."

She gently took the flower and turned it over and over in her hands, "It doesn't seem like much, Finnick. That girl, I mean, she volunteered and all, but Twelve… they're all half-starved."

"Without someone from Twelve, you'd have died."

"You don't know that." The girl from Twelve was one of three subjects that Johanna did not discuss. Finnick knew that by now.

"Jo, if you're not going to be honest with me, at least be honest with yourself."

She said nothing.

"This girl – Haymitch says there is something about her. Cinna agrees, and he's one of the most intuitive people I have ever met."

Johanna had gotten the same impression in the short time she had known him, but she wanted to argue, "Haymitch is a hopeless drunk. And Cinna, how did you meet him anyway? At one of these Capitol parties? Same way you met Heavensbee? I don't trust them, Finnick. I only–" she stopped, angry at herself.

"You only what?"

It took a long time, and a lot of grimacing to say it. "I only trust you, you idiot."

"Awh, JoJo… that's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me," there was laughter in his voice, but his eyes were all soft and crinkly in the corners.

She muttered something like, "shut up," and turned the flower over in her hands.

"You'll see, Johanna, I promise. We can wait to talk more until after the parade. Once you see her in the getup Cinna's made for her, you'll understand what this means."

At this point, there was little concrete information to go on, but she was beginning to get a vague idea, and it brought up even more questions. "Okay, so, I get from Plutarch's little intro that you boys are planning some sort of uprising. But how is a girl from Twelve gonna help with that? Even if she wins the Games, which, I might add, is not happening."

"Because Cinna is from the _Capitol._"She failed to see what that had to do with anything, but let him continue._ "_Do you want to know what made him decide to join the rebellion?"

"Obviously I don't."

Finnick was grimly delighted, "He watched some brat of a girl decide to ruin her stylist's costume and manage to get crowned a Victor looking like a bloody angel of death."

"But I–"

"You were angry. You felt controlled, you fought back the only way you could, and someone _noticed_. What happens if we make sure that _everyone _notices this time?"

This was all about manipulation, which she knew quite a bit about. That didn't mean she liked it. This was more than just a fat man knowing that she was willing to do literally anything to kill the president.

"What if Twelve doesn't want to go along with it?"

Finnick made an uncomfortable noise, "Well, she can't know yet. There's a lot riding on her. She has to _win_, and unless she has some sort of secret that we don't know about, in the end she's going to be alone in that arena. But the story according to Haymitch is that she has been keeping her family alive without a father or a very effective mother for the past four years. She knows how to survive."

"And if that sad sack is to be believed, and she does, she'll incite a rebellion."

"Not just _A _rebellion, Jo, _The _rebellion: the one that unites all the districts against the Capitol. It's been building for years. Every time a twelve-year-old is reaped, or a grain silo explodes, or disease takes out half a district's kindergarten, it strains just a little more. And there's more, much, much more, but it will take too long to explain and there's something else I want to tell you, just you, right now."

He was talking so quickly and earnestly her head was spinning. So much of Finnick's childhood had been stolen. Underneath all of his artifice, he was still just a fourteen-year-old boy – a Career who had been reaped in an off year before he was ready to volunteer. Nothing had gone the way it was supposed to in his life. He was so desperate to believe that it all meant something.

It was just too much. She didn't want to believe it. She didn't want to believe in anything. Especially not something that could bring this man so much hope that he would risk his life. On top of that, she remembered what it felt like to be in the same position as the girl from Twelve – to be someone who had something worth saving back home. She couldn't imagine leaving her Games with someone suddenly telling her that, without her consent, she was now the face of a nationwide uprising.

But she couldn't tell him that now. It danced too close to the things she wouldn't talk about.

"What could possibly be more important than all this, Finnick?"

His face lit up like the sun.

"I'm in love, Johanna."

* * *

><p>Annie Cresta. Annie <em>Cresta<em>? Poor, crazy _Annie Cresta_? Johanna hadn't thought that there was a bit of news that could be more surprising than, "We're trying to overthrow the nation's government after this year's Games," but this was definitely it. She could recall a phone conversation several months ago during which Finnick had complained about Annie for an entire hour. She was creepy, her eyes didn't focus right, she never brushed her hair, she forgot how to open doors sometimes, and on and on he had gone.

Well, come to think of it, his attention to detail in his grievances had been somewhat noteworthy.

It wasn't as though she doubted him. Even if she had, he was so vulnerable and honest in his revelation that he would have convinced her. But leave it to Finnick to pick the worst possible time and the least capable person for romance. It wasn't too surprising, seeing how he had picked Johanna as his best friend. There really was no accounting for tastes.

When they left the restaurant he had hurried off to an "appointment," promising to return to his penthouse well in time for the parade. It made her feel sick to think of. This is what he did every single day. Wake up, flaunt himself around the most popular locations, and then it was off to a series of rendezvous where he was expected to fuck, or be fucked by whatever delightful specimen Snow threw at him. He had done this for several months out of the year since he had been fourteen. And he had tried, despite any risk to himself, so hard to warn her.

Johanna hadn't even discovered masturbation until she was fifteen, which, embarrassing as it might be considering her current persona, was hugely preferable. She was now certain that her mother had occasionally slept with men for money, but she had still managed to keep her daughter well in the dark about sex for years. Finnick on the other hand, had been thoroughly educated by creeps, perverts, and desperate, delusional fans.

Somehow, despite all of this, he was still a person worth knowing. More than that, he was a person who still had access to emotions like love and hope. He was a person willing to take risks for causes bigger than his own loves and hopes as well. This rebellion, as much as she might distrust it, meant something to him.

She decided it would mean something to her too.


	7. Arrivals

_The instant the train stopped in District Seven, Johanna jumped out of the emergency exit. Needles had anticipated this and stalled for time, allowing her the chance to escape. By the time those that cared realized what had happened she had kicked in the door of her old house, pushed aside the old woman who was inexplicably there, and threw herself onto the small bed, clinging on to the warm, still body of her mother._

"_I'm so sorry, momma. I'm so sorry. But I won. I won. I __**won**__. And now I'm gonna make you better."_

_She burrowed under the covers and wept into her mother's neck for what seemed like hours. The same smell of pine, lemongrass soap, and a hint of sweat that had always clung to her mother now surrounded her. An emotion somewhat like hope kindled inside of her, and she cried even harder._

_Much later, Needles came into the house, quietly approached the bed, and gently sat her up. He softly explained that they had to go back to the train to stage her triumphant home district return. Caius, which was, in fact, her escort's name, had somehow managed to convince the camera crews that as long as they shot it before it was set to air in the Capitol, everything would be fine. Anders, whom she had never said a word to, had rounded up a decent percent of the nearby population to welcome her home for a second time. There was even a stylist waiting outside to straighten her up. _

"_And the doctors. I brought them. They're ready to see her, but we have to go."_

_She didn't need to be told what would happen if she didn't. Caius would probably be jailed or, more likely, executed. Needles, and even Anders, would be punished as well, though probably less publicly – Seven was short enough on mentors as it was. But, most importantly, the doctors would go back to the Capitol and her mother would stay asleep forever. _

_Breathing deep the sweet smell once more, she ran her fingers through her mother's hair. "I'll be back so soon, momma. And then you're gonna get off your lazy ass and we're gonna chop down some trees." _

_She stood up straight and looked more lucid than she had in days, "Alright, Needles. Let's go put on a show."_

* * *

><p>Johanna stood on Finnick's balcony in the gathering dusk, watching the Capitol citizens spill into the street like fluorescent ants from a hill of stained glass. In the slowly fading light, the harsh colors of the buildings had softened into something otherworldly and almost beautiful.<p>

In response to this observation, she put both hands on the railing, drew her head back, and spit as hard as she could over the crowd.

Behind her, a man's voice chuckled, but it wasn't Finnick's. She spun around to face Haymitch Abernathy, looking surprisingly sober and decidedly amused.

"What are you doing here?" she asked before spitting again, further this time.

"Well, I was here to meet Odair, but it looks like I get to watch you spit on people instead." He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms expectantly. "By all means, continue. This is the most fun I've had all day."

There seemed to be no point in pretending she wasn't enjoying herself, so she did as he asked.

"I see you managed to get yourself a tribute who isn't half-dead this year."

"Two, actually."

She raised her eyebrow with some doubt before turning and spitting one last time. "Yeah, that blondie? We'll see."

"He knocked a drink out of my hand on the train. No one's done that and lived in about twenty years."

"That just means you're gettin' old," she turned her head and leaned back, looking him in the eye, "and fat."

"You know, Johanna, I was feeling like Katniss had to be the surliest girl on the planet, but I see you've already achieved that glorious title."

She spun on the balls of her feet, springing towards him menacingly, "You wanna go, old man?" she said, before realizing that there was a knife poised about an inch away from her eyeball. Haymitch may be old and fat, but he was still unbelievably fast.

"A little less stabby in my place of residence, please. Blood is just a horror to get out of the carpet."

Their host was back from his "dinner appointment." When Johanna saw how exhausted he looked, she disengaged from Haymitch immediately. Finnick's neck was covered with bruises, and there was a small cut on his left cheek. The older man lowered his knife and offered Finnick his flask, which he took and drained without a word. No one really knew what to say.

Then, as if to save them all from an awkward conversation, a trumpet sounded signaling the start of the tributes' parade. Almost within the same instant, the magnifier screen on the edge of the balcony flickered to life, showing them a clear view to the street. The Capitol residents appeared little the worse for wear from Johanna's treatment. They were absolutely out of their minds with excitement as the chariot from One came into view. Eyes wide and rolling, many of the crowd seemed to be under the influence of mind-altering substances. They jumped onto each other, pushing and shoving with ecstatic violence.

Their golden boy stood beside her, cringing just slightly every time one of the more rambunctious citizens lashed out. She took his hand and squeezed it for just a moment, while Haymitch awkwardly tightened his hand on Finnick's shoulder.

"I need to get back to the Training Center. I'll see you there after this is all over. Here's the code to get in, thanks to our favorite little ginger," Haymitch turned to leave.

"You're going to go before you see them?" Johanna called.

"Don't wanna fill up my head with too much hope all at once," he responded as he walked away.

A moment later, she understood what he meant.

As the chariot carrying the tributes from Twelve appeared, the crowd went completely silent for what seemed like an eternity. Then, an explosion of noise rolled up the side of the building, almost physically knocking Finnick and Johanna backwards. When the sense of vertigo finally subsided, she looked down and was in complete awe at what she saw.

Katniss Everdeen was on fire.

Both literally and metaphorically she burned, as the small girl smiled, waved, and played to the crowd as though she loved every single second of it. The crowd, which had been impassioned before, was absolutely hysterical with joy. They threw her flowers, nearly trampled each other to be in the path of her blown kisses, all while screaming her name again, and again. The girl was resplendent.

And no one seemed to realize it more than the blonde boy holding her hand. He couldn't take his eyes off her.

The two Victors stood high above the crowd in complete silence, so transfixed by the sight before them that they couldn't even retreat into their own memories.

"Oh no," Finnick finally said.

"What?" she asked, much more harshly than she meant to. Something about this girl, this whole situation, set her ablaze with a jealousy that came from nowhere and made no sense.

"The other tribute… he loves her, I think," he said softly.

"How can you possibly know that? He's impressed with her, I'll give you that. But everyone in this whole city loves that girl right now."

Finnick shook his head slowly.

"Not like he does."

* * *

><p>Punch codes entered, they slowly rode the elevator to the top floor of the Training Center. The doors opened just in time for them to hear Haymitch, Cinna, and a soft female voice speaking. Haymitch was telling Effie Trinket that she looked tired, and shouldn't she get some rest? It was going to be a big, big day tomorrow. Effie's angry response was so squeaky Johanna couldn't make it out, and then she heard a quick clacking of heels and the sound of a door slamming.<p>

"Could you have put it any more harshly there, Haymitch?" the original woman's voice asked wryly.

Finnick popped his head around the corner smiling and saying, "I'm sure he could have found a way to be more insulting if he really had wanted." It seemed pretty impossible for him to avoid making some sort of entrance wherever he went. Johanna followed him in awkwardly, feeling a great deal of discomfort being in the Training Center again. She tried to make up for it by acting like she didn't care at all.

"Johanna, this is Portia. Portia, Johanna," the woman nodded slowly and smiled. "Portia is Peeta's stylist," Finnick added.

He took a seat and patted the couch next to him, but Johanna stood. She felt more secure that way. "Great job with the costumes. I mean, _really_ great job," she said with an earnestness that surprised even her. While she spoke, Haymitch picked up a bottle of wine from the table and proceeded to dump half of it into the television consol. It fizzed and sparked and then went dead. That was one way to kill the audio feeds in a room.

"Yeah, yeah, we get it. It was amazing. But now we have to make sure we do something with all this _amazement_."

"We?" Johanna asked, "Look, I said that I would fight or whatever, but what can I possibly do here? I'm not allowed to even talk to those tributes. If they found out Finnick and I were even here, well, I don't know for sure what would happen, but I don't think we'd like it much. What'd you expect me to do, anyway – teach that scrawny girl how to use an axe?"

"Look, dollface, aren't you supposed to be smart? I get that you're not really a people person, but if you want to help you're going to have to take a hint from Odair."

She turned her head to look at him so quickly that a numb feeling started at the back of her head and drifted down her shoulders, "Look old man, I'm not sleeping with anyone, so if that's what you're asking then just-"

Portia interrupted, "No, no, dear we'd never ask that of you. We… no, just... we wouldn't."

"Leave it all to me," Finnick said coldly.

"What? No!" Johanna shouted, suddenly frantic. "Why does anyone have to do that?"

Cinna leaned forward, "They need sponsors. Haymitch is only one man, and even with Effie's help he's only capable of getting to so many people. This needs to work virally, to spread through the social strata from the top down. And you can't get much higher than a Victor, especially ones like the two of you."

Haymitch poured himself a drink, "Basically Johanna, since Finnick already knows how to play this, let me lay it out for you. We need you to look sexy, or terrifying, or whatever you think will make rich people pay the most attention to you, and talk about how much you've been struck by District Twelve. Give them a reason to notice them. But make it subtle - keep loyal to Seven as much as you can. Make them work for it. It will be more believable"

"Don't they already have reason enough to notice? I mean, they were on fire. Everyone noticed them."

Finnick shook his head, "It was a start, and a pretty fantastic one at that, but they need more."

"Cinna and Portia will do their best to make sure they look good, and I'll do my damndest to make sure they say the right things in public, but that girl has as much personality as the business end of a hammer. She's going to need a miracle to make the kind of impression that people empty their pockets over," Haymitch said with irritation.

Once again, Johanna felt pity for this girl. Mingled with the earlier jealousy, it left her mixed up in an emotional conflict that was both distracting and annoying. "Okay, look. I get it, alright. You need help. And, did anyone actually watch my Games? I know how to play people. That part's hardly a problem. I just need a good reason."

"Freedom's not good enough for ya?" Haymitch finished his drink and poured himself another.

"There's only so many ways to trick yourself out of a good, old-fashioned firebombing. The Capitol has an army. We don't. How are we supposed to win?"

Cinna stood up and put on his jacket, as if to leave. "We just make sure the rebellion gets noticed by someone who does."

And with that, he left.

* * *

><p>It took four days, but when Katniss Everdeen was awarded an eleven by the Gamemakers, Johanna had something to work with. While Finnick went to the fanciest high society events, she dressed herself in knee-high boots, tight black pants, a red bra, and Cinna's leather jacket. She found herself accepted without much trouble into the darkest, most exclusive clubs the Capitol could throw at her.<p>

These places were domains of sadism and debauchery, where the glitz and glamour of the Capitol went about as evil and cruel as it was possible to go. Finnick knew all about the hidden underbelly of high society, but to the patrons of places like The Diamond Awl, such behavior didn't even have to be relegated to the underbelly. They fucked in public areas of the club, often brutally; using complicated tools to cut each other and drugs to make the experience last much longer than humanly possible. Even when they weren't having sex, there was a steady stream of blood leading into the drain on the floor from the casual ways they hurt themselves. Worse than all the violence, though, was the fact that afterwards they just slathered on expensive medicine, hooked themselves up to bags of blood, and left as good as new. Johanna had seen so many men bleed to death in sawmill accidents back home, and here they were just wasting medical supplies that could save hundred of lives.

But they were obscenely rich and loved their Victors just as much as anywhere else. She especially had won their respect with her brutality. Someone like Finnick would never have fit in – he was too glowing, too perfect. They liked the edge of wrongness that had been the defining quality of her Games. She had also been one of the few Victors to win without receiving a single parachute. They appreciated that kind of hard-edged independence, or at least thought they did, in reality knowing little of the quality themselves. So when she swaggered in, carrying her axe on her belt and no one disarmed her. In fact, they almost worshiped her weapon, as though it was the same one that had chopped a person to pieces. One woman actually begged her to hold it out, so she could slice her fingers on the edge. Johanna felt she could do nothing but oblige.

The clear favorite in the Awl was Clove, the vicious girl from Two. Johanna never argued her skills or clear penchant for cruelty when they brought her up, but she often wondered out loud what sort of money, and fancy training the girl had to have received, growing up as a Career in Two. She wondered if the girl even knew what _real _pain felt like. Katniss, on the other hand, she mused, had fought off starvation by taking up a handmade bow and surviving on the blood of animals.

Johanna had no way of knowing if the girl drank the blood of her kills, but she assumed probably not. However, she felt pretty comfortable letting the Capitol's darkest denizens believe the former. They didn't care about her sister or her mother. They didn't care about how sympathetically poor she was. They didn't care about the damn fire dress she wore as she spun around on the television the night of the interviews.

What they wanted was a badass as hard as Johanna and so she had worked for days to build the girl from Twelve up as one.

And then it all came teetering on the verge of collapse when that damn little blonde went and admitted to having a crush on her on national television. Of course he would. Finnick had probably shown up and convinced him to do it, just to prove her wrong. As the rest of the Capitol was likely swooning, the clientele at the Awl looked disgusted. They could care less about star-crossed lovers, unless said lovers liked to peel each other's skin off. They were ready to back out and support Clove again.

What she said in response was a risk, but Johanna decided to follow a new approach.

"Isn't it gonna to be just _rotten_ if she has to kill him? It'd be pretty awful if they end up being the last two alive."

It proved to be a risk worth taking, as the patrons almost all agreed that they'd pay _real good money_ to make sure that happened.


	8. Terrible Liars

_Johanna smashed the axe into the side of her former house feeling the already rotting wood easily split and shatter. She had been at it for hours now, her jaw set, her eyes dull. Some part of her recognized the mournful sound of the Capitol supply train moving away. It made her swing her arms even harder. She smashed out the windows she had peered through as a small child. It had been during those moments when she had heard her mother's horribly off-pitch voice singing bawdy logging songs that echoed through the forest, and she knew she was coming home._

_But Momma was never coming home._

_Needles caught the axe on a backswing and took it away from her. Ever the quiet one, she hadn't even heard him approach. If she hadn't been consumed with pain, she would have been impressed with how he disarmed her. Instead, she just collapsed on the ground in a heap._

"_They can't help her," she said, voice dull. "No one can. Eight percent chance that she'll wake up again." Anger began to build in her as she continued. "They __**suggested**__ I stop her IV, or make it strong enough to kill her. They're gonna leave when I come back from the Tour."_

_Needles was silent for a moment, then he took a few steps forward before raising the axe and cutting into a load-bearing wall. Johanna had never seen him do anything that required this sort of physical exertion before. He was extremely good at it._

"_Did you know that," __**swing**__, "all things being equal," __**swing**__, "each tribute has only a bit over a four percent chance of winning the Games?" The wall collapsed, and the entire house leaned forward, crashed into itself, then shuddered into stillness._

_In that moment, Needles seemed a very different man than he had been on the stage standing before President Snow. A tiny fragment of hope flared up for a moment in Johanna's heart._

"_May the odds be ever in your favor, Momma," she whispered._

* * *

><p>Katniss had befriended the tiny little girl who was clearly going to die, and now the two of them were making jokes. Curled up on the couch with a battered and exhausted Finnick sleeping on her legs, Johanna was incredibly annoyed. She had waited up, only for him to stumble in just before sunrise. His pupils were dilated so much that the green was almost gone. He could barely move for the trembling. She hadn't said a word, just let him curl up next to her and cling to her knees while he quivered and shook until he finally fell asleep.<p>

She wasn't annoyed at him, or even the people who had done this to him. He was innocent, and annoyed was too mild of a word to describe how she felt about _them_. The feeling could be more accurately described as frustration at every moment that went by during which she wasn't tearing them to shreds.

No, she was _annoyed_ at that uppity girl from Twelve, managing to go through the Hunger Games with a conscience, allying with doomed little girls. There had been little girls when Johanna had been in the arena. In fact, one of them had probably saved her life. A girl from Twelve. The disparity made Johanna aware in a way she typically wasn't of every miry inch of death that she had dragged herself through in order to get out, to get back to…

Well, to get back to nothing, it had turned out. Well, nothing except maybe Finnick. And he hadn't even existed to her back then.

The man in question slept through the supply explosion, and then through the inevitable death of the girl from Eleven. When, without a second of remorse, Katniss put the arrow through the boy who had hurt Rue, Johanna felt a surge of something. Camaraderie maybe? And then, as if to ruin it, the stupid idiot sang to the dying girl and covered her in flowers. Of course it was sweet and rebellious and perfect, but Johanna remembered the girl with the big eyes. Her only comfort had been the knowledge that her murderer was about to be destroyed. Maybe she would have liked someone to sing to her. Someone with a better voice probably, but all the same Johanna could have at least closed her eyes after she was dead. But she just hadn't, and here was a girl who had the same capacity for killing as Johanna possessed herself, but who played it so very, very differently. Despite herself Johanna found a small piece of her heart flare up; quietly, desperately hoping that Katniss would win. Not for the rebellion, or for her sister, but just because someone who still managed to keep that goodness inside her after killing someone should not have to die. Johanna pushed the hope away as soon as it had come. Working to make certain something came to pass was not the same as hoping for it.

She couldn't remember when she fell asleep, but much later Finnick was shaking her awake. He was telling her that the rules had been changed and that the Gamemakers were up to something. The broadcast was replaying the single, hoarse shout: "Peeta!" over and over.

She just could not _stand_ that girl.

Hours later, Finnick was gone again, and she was still on the couch, unable to bring herself to leave, or even change out of the clothes she had worn the night before. They were interviewing the families of the Victors, and the question of the day was the rule change. They had shown brief clips from the families of all of the remaining tributes, but focused almost all of the attention on District Twelve. The segment started in the bakery where a short, blonde, balding man stood awkwardly. His hands were on the shoulders of his two other broad-shouldered sons, who had the same self-effacing grins as their younger brother. A small angry woman stood in front of them, arms crossed impatiently. Peeta's mother. In the actual interview, she was the only one who made any damn sense, claiming that it was pointless for the district get their hopes up about her son's chances – she certainly wasn't, and if they didn't mind she had work to do.

After her came Katniss' tiny family, starting with her mother, who quietly, urgently spoke about how incredibly strong and resourceful her daughter was. The pale woman worried about Peeta's chances without the sort of medical intervention he needed, the type that not even the forest could provide. Primrose followed, trembling with a combination of pride, excitement, and fright as she repeated over and over that her sister was going to save Peeta, and they were going to win.

Then the cameras were entering a different house, a narrator mentioning something about the "simplicity" of the part of Twelve where both Katniss and her cousins lived. Inside, an adorable little girl played on the floor and two older boys gaped at the camera. A woman who might have once been statuesque and striking but now just looked worn-down shooed the two boys into the front yard, picked up the girl, and called out a name that was difficult to make out

A very tall someone ducked through the doorway to the stairs, and the cameras tried to focus on him. He made the task difficult for what was probably an eternity in the eyes of the operators, until he gave up and defiantly crossed his arms over his chest, holding his body like a coiled up spring. The woman had been his mother, that much was obvious, but her worn-out good looks were fresh and vibrant in her son. It was the middle of a workday, so he couldn't necessarily be eighteen yet, but Johanna'd be damned if he was much younger either. There was the same coloring that she had seen in almost all the tributes from Twelve, the same dark skin, hair and those light eyes… only his burned with searing intensity. As he glared into the cameras, she could feel the heat of his absolute loathing for the people to whom he was about to speak. It sent a little shiver up her spine.

"Well hello, gorgeous," she said to the screen.

He didn't even give the interviewers a chance to question him.

"She's going to win. That is, if that _baker_," he said the word softly, as though it poisoned him but he didn't want anyone to take notice, "doesn't get them both killed."

Cousin. her. ass.

* * *

><p>In the District Twelve Control Module of the Training Center, Haymitch looked like he hadn't slept in days. Since the Games began, he hadn't bothered to eat. Effie had kept him in just enough liquor to keep the withdrawal symptoms away, but not so much that he slowed down. The woman's powers of observation were greater than Johanna gave her credit for. She knew exactly when the cantankerous man needed more alcohol, and exactly how much to give him while keeping him sharp. He even began to smile whenever the taptaptap of heels came into the room.<p>

Positive conditioning sprung to mind.

Effie also didn't question why two Victors from other districts were hanging around the Twelve Control Module so much, though, with their respective tributes dead, they were technically allowed to be there. Her silence stemmed from two possible reasons: the more preferable one being that she assumed they were working as useful advisors. The more likely case was that Effie assumed herself privy to not one but two famous romances. Since the day he took her hand in the busy street, rumors about Johanna and Finnick's _passionate_ affair had spread like wildfire. A tiny blue-haired girl had actually stopped her in the street to ask her if he was a good kisser. The thought of kissing someone who couldn't clip his own fingernails properly and belted out dirty sea shanties in the shower was so absolutely absurd that it had taken every ounce of self-control not to laugh in the girl's face. Instead, she had put her hand gravely on her shoulder and said, "A lady doesn't kiss and tell." The girl, who had probably been about twelve and didn't seem to care that it was out of character for Johanna Mason to talk about being a lady at all, nodded seriously and bit her lip. Seeing the opportunity to actually do something productive, Johanna had added, "A lady also thinks very seriously about keeping her hair its natural color." The girl had taken a strand of blue in her hand and thoughtfully considered it.

If Effie and, by extension, the rest of the Capitol thought Johanna and Finnick were involved, it then gave them the right to have a vested interested in the future of the star-crossed lovers from District Twelve. That was useful, so she bit her tongue. In reality though, she was just as likely to have a whirlwind romance with President Snow. But that didn't mean she wasn't about to cover up the poor boy with her jacket when she realized that he had already collapsed, asleep, in what looked to be an extremely uncomfortable chair.

After covering him, she looked at the broadcast. Katniss had found Peeta and was dragging him to shelter. When they had finally made it into a cave, it was difficult to say for certain who was more likely to lose consciousness: Peeta for loss of blood and high fever, or Katniss from the frantic discomfort she exhibited trying to give medical assistance to someone on the verge of death. Haymitch's maddened eyes swiveled back and forth between the broadcast and the screen that displayed the sponsorships. The amounts that both tributes, but especially Katniss, had accumulated at this point were phenomenally large and steadily rising. Johanna's tributes had never even come close to that sort of money. But Haymitch was holding off.

When the girl finally worked up the courage to kiss the poor, malingering boy, she did it like someone who had clearly never even thought about kissing anyone before. Their mentor made a sort of strangled sound in his throat.

"You call that a kiss?" he snarled. Effie left the room, probably to bring some more liquor.

His fingers flew over the panel while he muttered to himself. Johanna leaned up against the console and watched his hands move more surely than she had thought possible.

"Ever consider sending her a note?" she whispered conspiratorially.

With a flourish, he completed the series of commands.

"Just did, dollface."

Watching a horrible liar try to force feed a delirious kid broth in a sad little cave was just not Johanna's thing. After an entire day spent talking up said liar's amazing qualities to a decidedly unsavory crowd, she was damn tired. She curled up against Finnick's chair.

If she hadn't been so completely exhausted, she would have heard the squeak of delight Effie made when she returned and noticed that the menacing Johanna Mason was asleep with her head on Finnick Odair's knees.

* * *

><p>While Katniss forced Peeta to <em>not die<em> through sheer strength of will, Finnick was forcing Johanna to wear a Capitol aberration that Cinna had not made. It was so completely ridiculous that she refused to put it on herself. Finnick dressed her like he would a toddler, which amused him a great deal more than it probably should have.

In the middle of the process, Marcus had come by with a message from Plutarch about needing five-sixths for coin. Johanna didn't understand it at all, but Finnick nodded grimly. Marcus had blushed as he saw Johanna's state of quasi-dress. She was actually wearing more clothes than he had ever seen her in before, but it didn't seem to matter.

"In case it means anything, kid, we're not together," she said through clenched teeth as she was squeezed into something with _boning_. The Capitol was full of all the body modification procedures a narcissist could ever want. Why did they need corsets on top of that?

Marcus averted his eyes and blushed even more. Was he ever not blushing? "Oh, Miss Mason, your personal life is most definitely your own business."

This was getting annoying. "Seriously. I am not sleeping with this stupid egomaniac! I don't ever want to sleep with him! Ever!"

"Come on JoJo, not even a little?" Finnick struck a heroic pose that was so clichéd that even Marcus laughed.

The sound of a trumpet from the Games broadcast that had been quietly playing in the background dampened the mood in the room considerably.

"A feast," Finnick said dully.

"You know the only way that kid is surviving this is with some high grade medication. At this point in the Games it would cost twice as much as your trident did. And the rich ones don't like him quite as much as they liked you."

"Lucky him," he responded darkly.

Marcus walked towards the screen, a strange look in his eye, speaking as though he had forgotten where he was. "I hate it when they lure them out like this."

"Oh shut up!" Johanna snapped.

"Jo!" Finnick interjected, but it was too late.

"You have _no right_ to care. You never had to worry about this. Not one moment in your life. You never stayed up late at night weeping on the day before your twelfth birthday. You never prayed that you'd never have another brother or sister. You never had to come to school the next year to see that one empty seat in your class. You especially never had to just stand there and do nothing while someone died right in front of you!" It was almost more than she could say in a place where they'd be heard. Almost, but not quite. Theoretically it was not against the law for District residents to hate and fear the fact that the Games existed. That was sort of the point of them, after all.

Marcus' face was still red, but it wasn't from embarrassment now. When he responded, his eager professionalism was completely gone.

"Don't you think I know that? Don't you think I knew that my entire life? Most children in the Capitol don't think about it. I did. I thought about it every single Reaping Day. We had to watch, we had to, but I would try so hard to get out of it. Once, before I was old enough for corrective surgery, I intentionally lost my eyeglasses so I wouldn't be able to see what happened. I didn't want to see who died so then I wouldn't have to see their faces whenever I closed my eyes. But I could still hear them. Their screams, or quiet chocking sounds. And even worse, the glee in the faces of the people around me. My friends. My family."

"These Games, they have to stop. Not just for the Districts, but for the Capitol. Before all our souls become as twisted as our aesthetics."

Finnick was horror-stricken. Johanna pressed her lips together in a thin line. This was more than enough for Marcus to lose his tongue, or even his life.

He said nothing, but the color on his face drained out slowly. He smiled sadly at them for a long moment. Then, with a steady hand he reached out and softly brushed his hand down Johanna's cheek. Against her will, she trembled.

The consummate professional, he added loudly, "Mr. Heavensbee will no doubt terminate me after such disloyalty to the Capitol. He has no tolerance for such behavior, as I am sure neither of you do either. I know such things would never even cross your mind. You understand why the Games must exist." He stared at Johanna for a long moment, "You understand very well." With a perfunctory upwards jerk of his chin, he turned and, opening the glass doors, stepped onto the balcony.

There was no force field to stop him when he jumped.

Finnick finished zipping up her dress in silence. He clasped her hand and led her out of the penthouse to the extravagant dinner that awaited them. They were used to death. They knew how to press on in its presence. The rich Capitol citizens needed to see them together so that they would think of nothing but lovers.

But as they passed the cleanup crew on the street, Johanna decided to allow herself the desperate, extravagant hope that the boy from Twelve with the burning eyes was right: Katniss Everdeen would _win_.


	9. Katniss

_On the day of the Victory Tour, just like any other, Johanna woke up and brushed her mother's hair. They had carried Elsa into in the brightest room of the house in Victor's Village. Someone before them had painted it clean, sunny colors. Johanna had hung an entire flock of paper birds from long pine boughs and strung them all from the ceiling. Needles had made sculptures, swirling abstract objects that twined around the bedposts, or rested in corners and reached to the sky. They often discovered small items on the porch: flowers, small woodcarvings, interesting rocks. Johanna never had felt before that her mother got much respect in the District, so at first the gifts annoyed her, but she put them in her mother's room all the same. People's motives never made much sense half the time, anyway._

_Just like every morning Johanna talked as she brushed. This day, she told her how, despite hating the idea of this tour, it was going to be interesting to see other districts. She wondered what sort of clothes they would wear – if they'd be different, or more like the Capitol. She worried about seeing the families of people she had killed. She even admitted to being nervous at the idea of spending that much time with Needles again. She described to her mother how he had been quietly supportive since her return, yet kept his distance. He had been instrumental in helping her survive. After seeing him fall to pieces in front of Snow though, it had been difficult to look at him the same way. Knowing why he had been her mentor elicited ambivalent emotions, at best. But, sometimes he did things that just made her feel, well… __**something**__. __Johanna would only admit to her mother that she didn't know how she felt about him – never to herself._

"_Yeah, momma, I know. I'm being an idiot. If he's confusing me, I should just say so, but it just never seems like a good time with all that's going on, and–"_

_She was interrupted by a loud knock on the door. Through the open window, she could hear the voice of a Peacekeeper calling out, "Johanna Mason? President Snow is here to see you with a matter of considerable importance. Open the door immediately."_

* * *

><p>Throughout their strained dinner, Johanna and Finnick were invited to several Feast Parties. She had never been to one before, but she understood the concept well enough. The feasts always seemed to bring out the best and the worst in the tributes: often they turned into mini bloodbaths that the viewers adored. Occasionally they became opportunities for the most clever tributes to show off their problem-solving abilities. Either way, they tended to be thrilling for the audience.<p>

Unfortunately, they were always at dawn. The socialites in the Capitol did not like to get up early in the morning, but they certainly loved staying up all night. So they had all-night parties, complete with stimulants, leading up to the feasts themselves. During the occasions when he was not mentoring, the parties always competed with each other to see which could convince Finnick Odair to attend. Usually Snow did the convincing, and it was no different this year. At dinner, a woman dressed all in brilliant blue had come to their table, delivering a white rose and a note.

"Oh great," he muttered. After he read the message, he looked up at Johanna with disgust still shining in his eyes. "Would you like to come with me to what I am about to make the hottest social event of the season?" his voice was so sickeningly Capitol-Finnick that she wanted to punch him.

Her hands were still shaking. Marcus was still dead and they were talking about a party. He was dead because she had opened her big mouth and said something that pushed him too far. He was dead because she thought she was so smart, that she just understood everyone's motives and could predict their actions so well. She had killed him. Just like she had killed everyone else. She decided she was never going to talk about him again. For a brief moment, she memorized who he had been and then filed him away with the others.

Finnick was waiting for her answer.

"Hell no."

"Conveniently you're already dressed for it," he responded, as though she hadn't said anything at all. "Hurry up and finish your dessert."

* * *

><p>The partygoers danced madly in front of a screen that took up an entire wall. The Games were broadcasting, but were muted for the time being. Instead, blaring music resonated through every corner of the room. It was impossible to hear anyone. Finnick was surrounded by what looked to be at least two hundred people. There was a spotlight on him constantly. He danced well, but when Johanna brought herself to look at him, his eyes were either calculating, or just flat and dead.<p>

She sat off to the side, sipping a tiny purple drink someone had thrust in front of her that made her lips feel numb. This charade was becoming almost unbearable. When they had arrived, she had kissed Finnick on the cheek and pushed him playfully into the dancing throng. As though she knew damn well how _involved_ he was with his admirers, and actively encouraged it. When they tried to pull her in after him, she had lifted up her hand and shook her head with a smile. It was a very toothy smile. The kind that she had made when she chopped up the girl from One.

"Not much of a dancer, my JoJo," Finnick had yelled as loud as he possibly could, and the crowd had laughed. Then they had left her alone. She was still a bit scary, after all.

About an hour after she had settled in to her spot on the sidelines, a plump woman with silver flowers on her cheeks sat down next to her. This was hardly the first time in the evening this had happened, and usually these stragglers just stumbled away on their own. But the current woman moved languidly into Johanna, as though she had been taking something. Johanna moved to shove her away, but before she could, the woman abruptly pushed her face very close to her ear. Whatever was in the purple drink had slowed her reaction time. She was only just reaching out to grab the woman's wrist when she felt a tiny something pushed into her ear canal. The woman's voice was suddenly all she could hear.

"Plutarch sent me," she said, matter-of-factly.

Johanna turned and gaped at her. The woman's face reflected nothing of the conversation, but smiled slowly, almost erotically. It looked bizarre on her chubby face. She reached out and caressed the shell of Johanna's ear, then turned her to face outward and leaned towards her like a lover might.

"I do apologize for taking liberties, but you understand, I'm sure, the importance of blending in."

Johanna couldn't respond, so instead she took the woman's hand and squeezed it.

"Plutarch wanted you to have the whole story. As a Gamemaker, he is monitored almost constantly. It is very difficult for him to meet with any of his… constituents. The consequence of him being implicated with any rebellious activity would be devastating to his efforts. However, he feels it imperative that you know what is going on, especially after the earlier events of this evening. As I understand it, Mr. Odair has not been given permission to inform you of any of the more specific details. "

Johanna squeezed her hand again, not realizing how hard she gripped.

The woman hissed slightly, "Marcus was young, and passionate. It got away from him, I think." At this, a hint of Capitol soppiness slipped into her voice. Conveniently, Johanna was not expected or even able to respond. "This meeting was planned before the unfortunate event even occurred, so there is little beyond that I know at this point, and it is of little importance right now. However, we need an element of redundancy in our network. Someone reliable, other than Mr. Odair, must be available to reach out to other victors. So it is important that you know our movement has supporters outside of Panem."

There was no outside of Panem. What was she talking about?

The woman continued to speak, and Johanna's eyes grew wider and wider.

* * *

><p>It was dawn. The woman with the flowers in her cheeks had long gone away, leaving Johanna to consider everything she had said. District Thirteen still existed, and Plutarch had been lobbying for their support for years. This was what Cinna had meant at the Training Center. Thirteen was willing to help, but only if almost all of the districts were in rebellion before the next Games. Five sixths, had been Marcus' message to Finnick. And now she was Finnick's backup, in case something happened to him. She dismissed that thought immediately, and wanted to make damn certain it never resurfaced again.<p>

Johanna didn't know what she was supposed to do with this information. It was satisfying to at last feel like she wasn't out of the loop, but it hardly affected anything she did. At this point that had boiled down to making sappy faces at her best friend and trying to convince people in sadistic sex clubs that a girl who hadn't even _kissed_ a boy before the Games deserved their sponsorship. She didn't know what sort of other things Finnick had been doing, how he had been reaching out to other Victors. A terrified part of her wondered if their entire friendship was based on his need to _recruit_, but she dismissed it. She was way too difficult to put up with for years for that sole purpose alone.

Right now, she would prefer to be back in the arena to the intrigue and subterfuge that surrounded her. She knew what to do in there. But Katniss was there instead, poised in the woods near the Cornucopia, ready for another amazing act of self-sacrifice. Johanna, meanwhile, was stuck sitting on an enormous leather couch, trying to figure out how this rebellion could ever possibly happen while also keeping an enthusiastically amorous couple from making out on her lap. The strange sort of intimacy that Johanna was beginning to feel with a girl she had never even met was disturbing at best. She was all they talked about, all they thought about. Everything was Katniss, Katniss Katniss. Their obsession may have had a lofty goal, but it was also just plain creepy.

She realized that Finnick had disappeared. She didn't know with whom, but it was probably best she didn't. Otherwise she might cause a very convincing scene as she took on the role of a jealous lover beating her rival to death.

The crowd gasped as the girl from Five arose from the Cornucopia itself, grabbed her backpack and ran. The frustration in Katniss was evident. She sprinted forward, only to be caught by the girl from Two, Clove. As the two struggled on the screen, Johanna was once again furious that people thought this brat was similar to her. She would have never tried to take someone out in such a situation. She would have snuck up on her, made certain the advantage was completely hers. Especially if she had an ally as big and hulking as the male tribute from Two. The girl was wasting time, threatening to cut Katniss' lips off while the very large, very unknown tribute from Eleven was still out there. What an idiot. If Johanna were there, Katniss would have been dispatched at the earliest opportunity, and Johanna would be running free through the woods with her prize in hand.

Clove, though, insisted on having a little chat.

Predictably, Eleven arrived and killed her, with a rock, of all things. He killed her for the other girl from his district, and then let Katniss go for the very same reason. Johanna was glad she hadn't had any allies in the arena. It would have caused such a complicated mess.

And then Katniss was running through the woods, bleeding profusely from a head wound. The crowd held their breath as her movements became less precise and the loss of blood threatened to knock her out.

She made it, of course.

Johanna stood up and walked out the instant Katniss stumbled into the cave. She wasn't about to wait around for Finnick, or pretend to be his lover anymore. There was no longer a need for her to try to get any sponsors for this girl. If there had been any remaining confusion on that point, the earth-shaking cheer that she heard from the crowd when she closed the door behind her would have been more than enough clarification.

* * *

><p>After that morning, she stopped watching. As a Victor, it was her right. One of the few she had left.<p>

Finnick, on the other hand, could not be pulled away from the broadcast, and so she left his penthouse and began wandering through the streets. They were empty, save a few groups of pedestrians who stared at screens as they walked. No one wanted to miss a second of the action between the star-crossed lovers.

Two days after the party, she glanced at a public screen only to see Peeta and Katniss passionately kissing. Moments later, the screen flashed to a rain-drenched field, where lightning flashes illuminated Two and Eleven locked in the sort of mortal combat that Gamemakers dreamed about. But that lasted only for an instant, and then once again, the broadcast went back to the cave.

This was exactly what they all had worked so hard to see happen.

It made her rabidly angry.

When she finally came home, Finnick tried to talk to her. She had nothing to say to him, nothing to say to anyone. She locked herself in her room and stood on the balcony that Marcus had thrown himself off of. She didn't think about him. Unfortunately, she didn't think about him so hard that it took the entire night to stop seeing his face as he touched her cheek. Sometimes he spoke in a soft voice with an accent that a person from Seven might have. Sometimes his face was replaced with another, more angular face that she never wanted to remember, but saw all the time.

Late afternoon the next day, Finnick knocked on her door, saying that Cato was dying, that he would be dead soon. He said he was going to the Training Center to be with Haymitch, and she could come if she wanted. He sounded very sad when he asked her if she would please just open the door.

She waited until she could hear him sit down with his back against the door before she opened it. He fell over backwards and she leaned over him, dressed in one of the outfits Cinna had made for her.

"Let's go see what the old drunk is up to."

* * *

><p>Effie Trinket was <em>feeding<em> him.

He sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin balanced on his fist, just staring as Katniss and Peeta waited for a group of mutts to withdraw. With a week's worth of facial hair, and a smell that strongly suggested he had not bathed in at least that long, it was amazing that the woman would even come close to him. But she was there, all the same, trying to get him to eat a bit of chicken soup from the ornate silver spoon she held in her lace-gloved hand.

"Haymitch, it's been days. You have to eat. They might need you and if you don't eat something you are going to pass out. Then there will be no one to help them; I certainly can't do it. Just _eat_, Haymitch," she said softly, almost pleading.

With a slow, twitching hand, he took the entire bowl from her and downed it in one gulp.

"Are you happy? Now get out of my face, woman."

Still holding the spoon, Effie's bottom lip trembled, then she jutted out her chin furiously.

"You are impossible, Haymitch Abernathy." She pushed between Johanna and Finnick, only to run right into Cinna, who had soundlessly entered behind them. Gathering herself together, she stomped out of the room. From the hall, they could hear Portia call out after the escort, asking if everything was okay.

The three of them said nothing as they entered, just wordlessly gathered behind Haymitch to look at the screen. Katniss was holding her bow at the ready, one last arrow left. She was waiting for the light. As it rose, Cato cried out to her. She let her arrow fly into the mass of flesh that had once been a handsome, arrogant child.

The cannon fired. And then nothing.

Johanna clenched her fists. Cinna exhaled sharply. The hovercraft came and carried Cato's body away. Finnick closed his eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath.

Still nothing. It was a very bad sign. The two tributes stood by the lake looking incredibly confused.

Haymitch went absolutely insane.

He picked up the chair he had been sitting on and smashed it into the console. He was shouting, but what it was impossible to say. He pulled the chair from the wreckage and then began using it to systematically knock out every screen in the room. Effie and Portia ran back in, shocked looks on their faces. Effie was calling his name frantically, begging him to stop, to wait until they announced _something_.

Johanna looked at Finnick and he nodded.

Rushing forward, they grabbed his arms. Finnick pinned them behind his back while Johanna positioned the chair in front of the remaining screen in the room. They pushed Haymitch into it and Cinna held him down. He finally quieted and put his face into his hands just in time to hear Claudius Templesmith announce that the earlier rule change was revoked.

Effie began to weep.

There was chaos. For a moment it looked as though the people in the Awl would be celebrating this evening, as Peeta found an arrow pointed straight at his heart. But he threw his dagger into the lake, and ripped off his tourniquet with absolutely no regard for himself. Johanna tried so hard to be disgusted, but she couldn't find it in her heart to feel anything but sorrow.

And then, Katniss did something no one had expected. She filled both their hands with berries, the same ones that had killed the tribute from Five.

"Hold them out. I want everyone to see."

They saw.


	10. Twice

_When she opened the door for the Peacekeepers, she had found herself face-to-face once more with President Snow. The smell of pine and lemongrass that filled the house mingled with the scent of roses, which he seemed to bring with him._

"_Johanna," he tipped his head to her in greeting, "let's take a walk and let your mother rest." _

_His tone left no room for argument, so she didn't even try. Unfortunately, "She can't do much other than rest, __**sir**__," slipped out before she could catch herself. _

"_Ah, yes, quite tragic," they descended the steps, and he gestured to the Peacekeepers to keep a respectable distance as they headed towards the copse of trees near Victor's Village. "I must say, Johanna, it is quite rare to find a Tribute for whom being reaped was only the second most dreadful thing to happen to her on Reaping Day."_

_She sighed angrily, "Yeah, well, I made it, didn't I? Can't be reaped twice, at least." _

_Snow chuckled, "Indeed. However, there is a small matter of some concern that I wanted to speak with you about before you arrive in the Capitol on your tour."_

_Johanna stopped walking, "Small matter? You make it sound like I owe you something."_

_Snow did not stop, and continued forward, tapping the bases of trees he passed with his silver-tipped cane. "Oh, I don't believe "owe" is the correct word. "Own" might be more accurate, but one doesn't want to be so vulgar. At any rate, I have some acquaintances in the Capitol who have taken quite an interest in you, and your performance in the arena. They are quite desperately hoping for a private introduction. At this point, it's all a matter of negotiation as to who gets you first, since you've been so helpful as to keep the… initial experience a valuable asset for me." _

_Oh Finnick. This was what he had meant._

"_No." she responded simply._

"_No?" he asked. _

"_No." she said. _

"_People don't tell me "no," Johanna."_

"_What are you gonna do? Kill my family? Last I checked, I basically took care of that myself."_

* * *

><p>Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark were crowned Victors of the 74th Hunger Games while Johanna and Finnick were on separate trains back to their districts. They didn't even give Snow a chance to send them away. Johanna had taken a few things from Finnick's penthouse – the jacket, a few pairs of pants, and the green dress, but left everything else. They reminded her too much of things she didn't allow herself to think about.<p>

She slowly trudged from the train station to Victor's Village with Anders and Blight. The two older men were weary and subdued in a way she knew all too well. Residents of the District came out of their houses to watch them pass, many glaring silently. Once again, they had taken two children away and failed to bring them back.

When they reached the small collection of houses, she veered to the left and went inside the newest one. She pulled a fistful of letters – all pointless nonsense from people she didn't even know – out of the mailbox, then opened the door. Trudging through the empty interior, she stomped back to the safe and opened it. Still full of money. This ritual completed, she marched back out the door and tromped across the yard to the house on the right. This house, though well cared-for, looked about seventy-five years older than the first. Johanna jimmied open a window and climbed in with practiced ease. She completely ignored the axe leaning right where it had been carefully positioned against what had become a small woodpile in the time since she'd left.

This house was lived-in. There were sculptures everywhere, dried flowers on the windowsills, and even a few pictures of a family that was obviously not Johanna's. She settled herself on the couch and fell asleep.

* * *

><p>She spent the next six months building up the woodpile again. For the first month, neither she, nor Anders, nor Blight acknowledged the other's existence. But every time she found a tree whose wood was suited for something more the kindling, it ended up on Anders front porch. She found her axe regularly sharpened when she woke up in the morning, sounds of activity echoing from Blight's metalworking shop. When the railing on Blight's porch rotted and fell off, a finely carved replacement was installed the next day, and it definitely wasn't the Capitol that had put it there.<p>

They helped each other in the only way they knew how.

There were young men and women in Seven whom Johanna had gone to school with. Before the day she was Reaped she had been, if not friends with them, at least on alright terms with most. Now they wouldn't really speak to her. It wasn't as though they were scared – well, not all of them at least. They didn't even know her well enough to actively dislike her. The truth was, Johanna reminded them of something dark and horrible that they tried very hard to forget for most of the year.

Finnick still called. He tried not to talk too much about Annie, but didn't seem to be able to bring up anything without mentioning her. It was obvious that they were together at this point, and very much in love. She was happy for him. He had Annie, and, despite the old woman's recent stroke, he still had Mags. His own parents had committed him to being a Career at a young age, but then died around his tenth birthday. Mags had inexplicably taken him in. Johanna always thought that maybe the old woman had intended for him to give up his plans of volunteering for the Games, but they never did find out because Finnick had been reaped anyway. Regardless, he had a family, albeit a small one. He might understand what it meant to be a Victor, and there might even be a whole part of _his_ life that Johanna would never understand, but he did _not_ know what it felt like to be completely alone as she was.

Two months in, Anders and Blight began to meet on Blight's porch to share a bottle of a sort of alcohol Anders made from juniper berries. Johanna would sit on the woodpile and watch them. The two men never spoke, just slowly passed the bottle back and forth. This was the way it happened every year.

Three months in, she started lighting bonfires in the space between the house that was hers and the house that she slept in. The two men would wordlessly leave their homes and sit with her. Sometimes Blight would play the guitar Anders had made. He wasn't very good, but the music was soothing.

Then the leaves changed and the air got cold. It slowly became too uncomfortable for bonfires or getting drunk on the porch. Johanna's woodpile began to get smaller and smaller with every passing morning. During the day, Blight helped her chop down more trees to replenish it. Anders started to tell ridiculous old stories about a man with a giant blue ox. Blight would make awful jokes. By the time the first snow fell, Johanna found herself laughing at them.

Then the day came, as it did every year, when an envoy would arrive, magnanimously inviting them all to the Capitol for the celebration of this year's Victory Tour. This day always shattered the strange sort of camaraderie they had built up among themselves, and caused silence to reign again. But instead of the flamboyantly dressed Capitol escort, a contingent of Peacekeepers marched up the hill and knocked on the door to Johanna's house. Of course, she didn't live there, so they knocked for a long time.

She finally tired of watching them, and opened the door of the house across the street. She stepped onto the porch and leaned into the bannister.

"Lookin' for someone?"

"Johanna Mason?" a sour faced woman asked.

"Want my autograph? I can do it in your blood if you're into that."

The woman did not seem to be interested and continued, "We are here to inform you and the rest of the Victors, that your presence is not required in the Capitol for this year's Tour. In addition, the current Victors, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, are to enjoy their time in Seven unmolested and undisturbed."

Johanna stepped off the porch and picked up her axe.

"Did you just _uninvite_ me from my own party?"

* * *

><p>She watched the broadcast of the Victory Tour on her couch, occasionally joined by Anders and Blight, but most often alone. She watched the star-crossed lovers frolic in the ocean, wander through cornfields, gaze with awe as they stood at the tops of mountains, and stand shocked, surrounded by enormous factories that produces sophisticated Capitol electronics. They gave speeches in front of crowds, and even coated with the sparkling sheen of Capitol editing, Johanna could see that the atmosphere in the districts simmered with unrest.<p>

This was good. This was what they had wanted, wasn't it?

The instant after Peeta Mellark proposed on national television, her phone rang.

"This is too hard to watch alone," Finnick said.

She didn't bother to ask what he meant. He couldn't have told her anyway. She didn't even ask where Annie and Mags were, just held the phone to her ear in companionable silence as Katniss joyfully accepted. She pretended not to hear Finnick's tears on the other end.

* * *

><p>As the Tour came to a close, the paper factory workers clumsily painted mockingjays onto signs and went on strike. The conditions in the factory and the solid month that each worker had to spend there had been a cause of displeasure for a long time. Everyone had always assumed it was the way things were. But there had just been <em>two <em>Victors because Katniss Everdeen refused to do what the Capitol demanded. Maybe that meant that things could change in the factory as well.

It didn't.

The peaceful request for shorter hours and better working conditions was met with a brutal response. Strikers were whipped and many just disappeared. The Peacekeepers mistakenly believed that a quick, brutal response would convince the District Seven residents to quietly return to their homes.

They blew up the sawmill instead.

* * *

><p>The Victors were under what amounted to house arrest "for their own protection." The phone lines were cut and no one was allowed to come in or out of Victor's Village. Blight started drinking the juniper berry liquor during the day. Without more wood to chop, Johanna mindlessly folded long streamers of paper. Anders, who never left the neighborhood anyway, didn't seem to mind as much. He brought them each a bowl of awful split pea soup late every afternoon. They weren't certain where he came by the food, but they were grateful for it because anything else was tough to come by.<p>

In town, the uprising was squashed, but many of the rebels escaped into the forest. For many of them, most of their lives had been spent there. Once gone, they were very difficult to find. For everyone who was left, the last strangled bit of winter was the harshest in living memory. The supply trains stopped running, and with the sawmills gone, no one could afford food anyway. Although Seven was one of the poorer districts, starvation was not something that happened regularly. The threat of freezing to death in the winter had always been a more serious concern. Both were happening now. Johanna decided that revolution probably involved a lot more starving to death and a lot less dying in glorious battle than advertised.

She hadn't heard from Finnick in weeks. She had no idea if he was alive, if anyone was still alive. The rebellion seemed aimless and hopeless. Seven could have easily been the only district in revolt. She now understood why unity had seemed so important to Plutarch. It made things seem to have a goal. Disconnected and paralyzed in what was basically a posh jail, she felt useless.

As the bitter end of winter began to dissipate, she realized that if Finnick were dead, she was the only one left. She was going to have to do something. So she started to train. She ran circles around the neighborhood for hours. After about a week, Blight began to join her. They practiced throwing axes into targets painted on the side of the newly-built house. Unable to either walk or see well enough to join them, Anders would sit on a stump and give pointers. At night, they would return to their homes. Johanna would fold more paper, Blight would drink.

Neither of the other Victors ever asked why they were doing this. Johanna wasn't sure if she would be able to tell them if they had. It was obvious that they were under close observation. But she was happy to not be doing it alone.

Whatever it was that she was even doing.

* * *

><p>Spring arrived and the trains finally started running again. In the forest, the rebels continued to break up supply lines, but the Capitol presence was strong enough that they never did get back into the populated portion of the district. Logging began again in earnest, and the paper factory resumed production. The phone lines were repaired, and the Victors were once again allowed to leave Victor's Village. Life wasn't happy, persay, but it had never <em>really<em> been before the uprising either, so it was tough to tell much of a difference.

She should have known the Quell announcement was coming.

Turns out you _could_ be reaped twice after all.


	11. Girl Talk

**Part Two: Brainless**

_The Victory Tour was over. Almost over, anyway. It had been unpleasant, to say the least. Caius had been under under strict instructions to lock Johanna in her room whenever she did not have an engagement. She had been allowed to see Needles only when surrounded by other people. It hadn't mattered anyway when they reached the Capitol. Whenever he was there, he became overcome with panic and terror. She no longer felt repelled by it, but it certainly would not have made her life any easier._

_She had seen Finnick Odair on the arm of a different woman at every Capitol event. When he had seen that she was clearly unattached, he had looked at her with a great deal of confusion on his face. She had glared back defiantly. Maybe he was the Capitol's pet, but she'd be damned if she sunk so low. Snow had nothing to hold over her. What was he going to do – destroy her family? Life in Seven had already managed to do that. Torture her? Victors were sacrosanct to the Capitol, and Snow's own behavior proved how popular she really was._

_He had been at the Capitol events too. He had only spoken to her once, but when he did, he had been polite, and barely menacing at all. It had unnerved her. She hadn't expected him to give up so easily._

_As the train slowed at the District Seven station, she was bouncing on the balls of her feet before the exit, Needles right behind her. For reasons both different and similar, they wanted nothing more than to put this entire experience behind them._

_The doors opened, and she stepped out to the same flurry of cameras that had been there the last time she had returned on a Capitol train. _

_What had not been there the last time was the small figure leaning against a silver-tipped cane._

"'_Bout time you got back, brainless."_

"_Momma!" Johanna screamed._

* * *

><p>If there was one thing she could count on in this world, it was that Lavinia was <em>always <em>going to dress her as a tree. The old woman was basically a two trick pony: paper one year, trees the next, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. In a world of fashion where the sky was the limit, the old hag worked towards the lowest common denominator every single time.

Johanna stood in the remake center, holding up her arms as the jumpsuit that was her costume slid up her now frighteningly smooth body. Lavinia chattered on about how, thankfully, she had made a full headpiece this year because what on _earth_ was Johanna thinking when she had cut off all of that lovely wavy hair?

What she had been thinking at that point was so incredibly not up for discussion that she had actually laughed. Lavinia tutted and forced her arms into the sleeves with no gentleness whatsoever. She was still angry that Johanna had had the gall to wear designs made by _other _stylists during her brief and extremely public dalliance with Finnick Odair.

Since she was going back into the Hunger Games for the second, and almost certainly the last, time Johanna did not give a damn about what her stylist thought.

The Reaping had been pathetic. Caius had taken so much time digging around the huge ball trying to catch the single slip of paper in it, that she had finally just stalked forward calling out, "I volunteer, you moron!" Blight's name had been called next, and they were rushed onto the train with no ceremony whatsoever. They didn't have anyone to say goodbye to anyway. Anders was the only one who talked to them, and he was coming along.

It seemed, often enough, that the only people who ended up as Victors were the people who were almost completely alone to begin with. If they didn't start that way, that's sure how they finished. Well, nearly all of them anyway. Cecelia's reaping, with those little kids, had been particularly painful to watch.

Finnick's had been absolutely awful.

Annie's meltdown had been monumentally worse than anything tantrum Johanna had ever thrown, real or otherwise. She had writhed, and screamed, slamming her own head into the stones on the pavement until the blood flowed in streams down her face. Mags, frail and old as she was, looked infinitely more capable of handling the arena. When Finnick's name had been called out of all the many other Victors from Four, he hadn't even looked surprised. Somehow, he had ignored Annie, with her bloodied face and wailing cries, and marched onto the stage. It was only when he stood next to Mags that Johanna could see the tremors that wracked his body.

Despite all they had done to hide it, Snow had been watching them.

Finally free from her stylist's ministrations, she stood in the chariot next to Blight, both dressed as hawthorn trees. Apparently Lavinia had already costumed previous tributes as _every other possible tree in existence_, because for the illustrious Third Quarter Quell, she had settled on one that was more of a scraggly shrub than anything else. Johanna was the tree in fruit, and had berries dangling from her ears. The thorns themselves kept catching on the leafy part of her headdress. This was worse than the damn willow. There was no point in any sort of warpaint – no one could even see most of her face. She couldn't imagine how emasculating it had to be for Blight, who regularly pulled out all of the bulbs from his front yard because he thought daffodils and tulips looked too feminine for a man's house. Somehow, he had ended up as the tree in flower. What had _he _done to piss Lavinia off?

She turned to glance at him, and the stony look on his face made her cackle with laughter despite the situation. The flowery headdress was flopping over the right half of his head, but you could still see the scar he had insisted on keeping, the one that bisected his left eyebrow and went all the way down to the middle of his cheek. Scars and flowers.

"Shut. Up." he muttered, ever a man of few words.

She just laughed harder.

Finnick was mostly naked, of course, because really, what could the stylist have possibly improved on? They had nodded at each other briefly, but nothing more. To have a casual conversation would have been too difficult. It was almost impossible already for her not to jump down and climb into his chariot, spilling out all of the things they hadn't been able to discuss for the past year. Or even just to grab his shoulder and make sure he was really alive. Somewhere behind her were Katniss and Peeta, but she hadn't been able to see them before she got into the chariot, and with this headdress, it was impossible to turn her head. So she stood next to Blight and laughed at him for the duration of the parade. To the few spectators who could even see her mouth, it probably looked like she was just really happy.

She caught up with Twelve by the elevators. They were still holding hands, glowing like embers even from behind. They looked… amazing. She looked like a damn scrubby tree. As her mind established this unflattering comparison, the idea of meeting Katniss Everdeen in the flesh suddenly seemed quite intimidating. Then infuriating. No one intimidated Johanna Mason.

Ripping off her headdress, she strutted forward until she stood next to them. After briefly brushing the leaves and berries out of her hair, she finally took a look at the girl she had spent the past year reluctantly thinking about at least once a day. She was smaller in real life. And not particularly pretty.

Well, it was now or never.

"Isn't my costume awful? My stylist's the biggest idiot in the Capitol. Our tributes have been trees for forty years under her. Wish I'd gotten Cinna. You look fantastic."

Oh, that was perfect. She had managed to make it through twenty years of life without ever having to resort to girl talk, and here she was pulling it out now. No matter how much she loved clothes, especially Cinna's clothes, this was really not the moment to discuss them.

Katniss looked confused for a moment, then said something about velvet that convinced Johanna that she wasn't particularly great at girl talk either. In fact, she was significantly _worse _at it. The feral part of Johanna, the part that got just maybe the tiniest bit of enjoyment from chopping up threatening rivals, but most definitely did _not_ like feeling jealous, jumped at this brilliant opportunity to cause discomfort.

With calculated ease, she blithely responded, bringing up a specific dress that Katniss had worn on her Victory Tour. A blue one with four diamond stripes on the right hand side. It had been one that Cinna had designed for _her, _but had reused for some reason_. _Probably because she had left it in the Capitol like an idiot.

"I wanted to reach through the screen and tear it right off your back." And she most definitely had, maybe taking a few chunks out of the Girl on Fire along with it.

Katniss' eyes flickered with a hint of nervous anxiety, and she subconsciously squeezed Peeta's hand tighter. Johanna noticed this too and the feral part of her rejoiced. The girl was so obvious it was almost sad. This was going to be so much _fun_. As the elevator approached, she pulled down her zipper. The doors were opening when she kicked her jumpsuit away with a sigh of relief. Then, right before the doors closed, she stepped inside after Katniss and Peeta, naked as the day she was born.

People from Twelve might have olive skin, but Katniss blushed like a redhead.

"So, I hear you're a painter…" Johanna said to Peeta, standing directly facing him. He was quite handsome in person, even with all the makeup. Polite too. He let go of Katniss' hand to shake hers.

_Take __**that**__, fire-girl. _

The blonde boy smiled benignly, seemingly unaffected by the fact that there was a young and, she could also add, pretty damn fine woman standing naked inches in front of him. "I dabble. Do you like to paint?" She responded in the negative, but asked him about his technique, to which he enthusiastically responded, excited to have an audience that actually knew something about his art. There was a moment of delicious victory when his eyes appreciatively swept down and up her body one single time. Then, to her extreme irritation, they flickered in Katniss' direction for much longer. The girl herself was looking everywhere in the elevator but at them. Peeta reached for her hand again, and she took it very grudgingly, still refusing to make eye contact. He grinned, as though he found his fiancée's embarrassment and what looked to be a bit of envy to be the most endearing thing he had ever seen in his life. He grinned to himself like a guy who hadn't done so in awhile.

He was absolutely delighted, and even a bit shocked, that she was jealous.

Lucky for him, Johanna intended to make Katniss Everdeen jealous as often as she possibly could.

* * *

><p>Later that evening, after Blight had thrown a bunch of clothes at her head and told her to "Knock it the fuck off," she dressed and made her way onto the roof. As she expected, Finnick was there. He clung to her for a very long time, and she could feel his tears on her shoulder. This was a bit much, even for him, but then, he'd had a pretty rough few days.<p>

"Is Annie okay?" she asked, finally pulling back so she could actually look at him.

"Yeah," his voice was husky. "But, we both were reaped out of so many victors. There's no way that was a coincidence. Snow he… he wants to get rid of me. He wants to get rid of all of us. She's not safe. Or Mags. It's this rebellion. I can't keep them safe anymore. I can't, even after everything I…" he trailed off and swallowed. All they could hear was those awful wind chimes and the whistle of the wind. There was nothing to say. Chances were, Mags was not going to make it out of the arena, no matter what happened. The woman who had been the only mother that mattered to Finnick was going to die to save the life of the woman that he loved, but couldn't ever really be with. There was no way of knowing if Finnick himself was going to make it out alive. And if he did, where would that leave Johanna? Dead herself, obviously.

As the gusts dried his tears, something changed in the way he held himself. The boy who had ruthlessly killed for the cameras was replaced with a man who had gone through hell, maybe even sold his soul, to protect something he was going to lose anyway. His face grew hard and terrible.

"These Games are going to be the last ones the Capitol ever has."

"What?"

"Plutarch's convinced Thirteen. All we have to do cause a riot in the Capitol that's distracting enough to cover their hovercrafts so they can get to the arena, and they're in. We just have to bring them Katniss and they'll join us. They might even be able to get us out of the arena. They've planned it all. Plutarch's planted something in the arena that Volts invented to blow out the force field."

"Why do they want her?"

"You've seen her, Jo. She makes people feel strong. They believe in her, and she doesn't even know it. Every revolution needs an inspiring leader."

"Okay fine, she's a magical little hero, and I'm sure she won't have a single problem being the face of this rebellion. But how are we going to be able to cause a huge Capitol riot, Finnick? Ruin dessert? Cut off their hair product supply? You know, with our little army of octogenarians, substance addicts, and amputees."

His hard face dissolved as he laughed and the boy was back. But when he grew calm again, a bit of the angry man was still in his eyes.

"We can't, Jo. Not a single one of us can do something like that. But you know what?"

Finnick looked out across the sparkling skyline with a face so full of hope and tragedy that, for that fragment of a second before he continued, Johanna wondered what it would be like to love him.

"I'm pretty certain Peeta Mellark can."


	12. Burn

_For the first time in a day and a half, Johanna left her mother's side, stepping out on the front porch to get some more wood for the fire. It was one of the coldest winters in her lifetime, and now that she could afford it, she never wanted her mother to feel cold again. Elsa herself was curled up on the couch, blissfully eating an entire bag of truffles that Johanna had brought back from the Capitol. They had spent the day laughing and joking. Every time Johanna began to cry and apologize for what she had done, Elsa had smacked her in the side of the head and said, "Knock it off, brainless. I'm fine." Johanna didn't know what the doctors had done - they had been gone before she arrived, leaving her mother with the same old woman who had been there before - but she was too happy to even care._

_As she closed the door, one arm full of wood, the phone began to ring. Relieved that the doctors were finally calling back to explain how the hell they had managed to wake her mother, Johanna put the receiver to her ear._

"_How's the family, Johanna?" came the voice of President Snow._

_The logs clattered to the floor at the same time the remaining truffles rolled onto the hearthrug. The phone fell from her hands and she ran as fast as she could into the living room._

_A moment later, when she threw herself in front of the couch, Elsa was seizing. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and bloody foam gathered at the corners of her mouth. Johanna had seen death throes before, she knew what they looked like, but it didn't matter. _

"_Momma just hold on, just hold on Momma. I'm gonna get the healers and we'll fix you right up. Don't you worry Momma, just don't you worry it will be okay, everything's gonna be fine."_

_Unlike the girl from Twelve, Elsa was too far gone to say anything. Instead, she just died, right there in the living room._

_Much, much later, Johanna wrapped her mother in the warmest blanket in the house, and took her outside. She sat her in the rocking chair on the porch, sitting to face the sunset. _

"_I'll be back soon, Momma. You just wait here and watch the sky."_

_She broke open a lamp, and poured the fuel all over the couch, the walls, the floor. Opening her safe, she took the bundle of currency she had received this month from the Capitol, and stuck it in the fire until the end was burning brightly. Using it as a torch, she set the kerosene alight. _

_When Needles smelled smoke and ran out of his house, he discovered Johanna standing barefoot in the snow, holding her mother's body, and watching her house burn down. _

* * *

><p>Johanna oiled up her breasts and thought about Peeta Mellark.<p>

Well, not like that.

She was trying to figure out just what exactly was so special about the kid. The whole rebellion was resting on the hope that he could somehow work the Capitol residents into a frenzy during his interview. He wasn't allowed to know, of course, because that might sully his performance somehow. Her whole life was depending on him, really, because when push came to shove, she'd slit her own wrists before she let Finnick die in the arena. She didn't think she could survive with the death of anyone else she cared for on her conscience.

And that was all she was ever going to allow herself to think about that.

Directly to her right, Peeta had just finished throwing spears with Brutus and Chaff, and now Blight had joined them, and they were was throwing knives. Peeta wasn't particularly good at either. Not necessarily bad – it would probably get the job done in a pinch – but having achieved mastery in at least one type of thrown weaponry, Johanna could see that he just didn't have the right follow through. Maybe because he kept inadvertently glancing at Katniss. It was pretty clear that he didn't even realize he was doing it, but the effort of subconsciously tracking someone at all times kept him from focusing on his target.

Johanna didn't know what it felt like to be in love, nor did she particularly want to, but she certainly hoped that if such a… _auspicious_ day ever arrived, that she'd manage to keep herself together a little better than that boy did. It wasn't that he was constantly distracted, per say. In fact, he had the rare ability to really listen to whoever it was that spoke to him. But he was tethered to his fiancée in a way that seemed to go beyond a simple engagement. Maybe it was because they were both going to die, but she had never seen someone so attentive to anyone else in her life. But as far as Johanna could see, Katniss behaved like someone more anchored than tethered, and somehow combined both the negative and positive associations of the concept together in a kind of frustrated neediness. She didn't exactly look like she was shaping up to be a stellar life partner, that was certain.

Then there was the small matter of her "cousin" back in Twelve. The tall dark and handsome one who looked like he wanted to watch the world (especially a certain baker) burn. How many more "cousins" did Katniss have, exactly? Hell, if they all looked like him, was she willing to share?

Of course there could be thirty of them for all it was going to matter to Johanna. She was probably going to be dead before she got the chance to meet a single one. From the looks that Enobaria was giving her as she impatiently waited for Johanna to finish oiling herself up, her death would be sooner rather than later. The woman from Two had stripped down to her underwear, and was clearly eager to kick her opponent's ass.

Atala had explained the basic rules. The oil was to keep the wrestlers from injuring each other, and also required them to have stronger holds: any weak hold would be easy to slip from. Johanna had no intentions of oil wrestling anyone in the arena, and, by extension, ever again, but Enobaria had been throwing around weights, silently boasting about how damn strong she was and it rubbed Johanna the wrong way. An added bonus was that Katniss was already starting to blush in the presence of more nudity. She glared at her fiancé who had apparently noticed Johanna at the same time, then turned her back abruptly, braid spinning, as though she had just caught herself doing something she did not want to admit to doing. After that, she kept her back to all of them, focusing very hard on what the District Three tributes were saying to her.

When the two most terrifying female tributes started wrestling, members of the group of men throwing knives began to cheer like drunken Capitol meatheads at a Feast Party. Well, at least Brutus and Chaff did. She could vaguely hear Blight mutter, "For _fuck's sake_, Johanna…"

Her attention was then forcefully directed to the fact that Enobaria was no slouch at oil wrestling.

"Do this often, Nobby?" she asked conversationally, as the older woman tried to fold her spine in half. She was answered with a grunt. The dawning awareness of what it felt like to have one's liver _twisted_ became a new addition to Johanna's list of sensory experiences_. _Brutus and Chaff were guffawing at this point, while she could hear Blight saying incredulously, "It's like she doesn't _believe _in clothes," to no one in particular. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Peeta glance over dispassionately, chuckle a little, and then toss a knife that he, for once, buried directly into the center of the target.

With a shimmy of her hips, Johanna flipped Enobaria and herself over, so that the older woman was on her stomach, arms pinned behind her with the side of her face smashed against the mat.

"Okay, that was fun, Nobs, but I'm bored now."

Enobaria growled and drove her head back in Johanna's chin. The abrupt blow caused Johanna let go of her opponent's slippery arms, and in a beat, she found herself once again contorted into a shape she didn't even know her body could form. There was no question about it. Enobaria was strong. Her legs especially were significantly stronger than her own, Johanna noted, as her chest was squeezed very tightly between them.

It was somewhat unnerving, staring into that gold, pointy smile. "Give up, little mouse?"

The reference was not lost on Johanna. And really, there was not much else she could do. Enobaria had the better position, more experience, and was clearly stronger.

But she was also still wearing clothes.

With a surge of energy, Johanna lunged forward, grabbed the back of Enobaria's bra, and yanked it towards the floor as hard as she could. The woman was pulled backwards by the strong elastic, and Johanna slithered free, putting her knees on the woman's elbows, completely pinning her to win the match.

"Next time, I'd suggest you ditch the clothes," she advised, standing up.

In lieu of a response, Enobaria snarled.

Those teeth were just disgusting.

* * *

><p>Over lunch, Johanna was somewhat surprised to learn that, not only was he handsome and polite, but Peeta Mellark was <em>hilarious<em>. She had wedged herself between Finnick and Blight so she could steal their food when they weren't looking. It turned out to be easier than she anticipated, because they were riveted by Peeta's stories about the bakery, his brothers, and some of the more ridiculous customers he had seen. Stone-faced Blight was actually in tears, he was laughing so hard. At one point, he even managed to make the ice twins from One crack brief smiles. It was almost as though they were doing something _normal_, instead of sitting down to eat a meal with people they were supposed to kill in a few days.

Katniss, on the other hand, was not funny at all. She spoke quietly to the people sitting closest to her, but seemed incapable of joining in with the group as a whole. Shortly before sitting down, she had thrown a little tantrum next to the gravy as she spoke to her fiancé, messing up his shirt in the process. He had done his best to soothe her, it hadn't done much good.

Why did people _like _her so much? More to the point, why did _Peeta_ like her so much?

Johanna tried to pinpoint what it was that made her dislike Katniss. First off, it bothered her how she kept trying to _save _people. That was a luxury that Johanna hadn't ever been able to afford. Sure, she would have loved to save that damn girl from Twelve, but she had needed to stay alive to get back to…

No she was not going to think about that.

In addition to that, the attention Katniss got didn't even make sense. Johanna had been just as much of a badass in the arena. Possibly more. She had _decapitated_ someone. What's more she had done it without allies or sponsors. Katniss, on the other hand, had spent less than half of her Games alone, while during the rest of it, Rue and Peeta had been busy saving her, or giving her golden opportunities to be self-sacrificing and noble. Rue, who made everyone sympathize with her and Peeta, who made her special by giving her attention she did not deserve. Pretty much everything Johanna had done, she had done by herself. No one was there to comfort her. No one was there to make sure she was noticed. It just wasn't fair.

But then, the fact that Johanna was even considering what was fair under their circumstances seemed like a pretty juvenile regression.

Was this what it was like to have a bratty little sister?

After lunch, when she stood, mouth agape, axe hanging loosely out of her hand, and watching Katniss shoot five airborne targets in a row, she decided that if she'd had a sister like Katniss, she'd have let her play with nightlock in her crib.

* * *

><p>Her demonstration for the Gamemakers had been flawless. She had picked up three axes: two small, one big. With a sweeping spin, she threw the first two so hard that they knocked the dummies over. The head of one was completely split in half.<p>

The large axe made the air sing as she swung it through the air, dismembering three more dummies as she walked past them. She didn't even look, as the plastic heads and arms fell at her feet. She kept her eyes on the Gamemakers. No blinking.

Then she started to run as hard as she could. Jamming the haft of the axe against the ground, she vaulted herself into the air, and gracefully spun one hundred and eighty degrees until her feet slammed against the force field. The energy rocketed her back, but she arched herself gracefully and flipped head-over-heels, still holding onto the axe, and decapitating three more dummies on the way down. She didn't feel the burns on her feet when she landed or the tremors left by the electricity that had flowed through her body.

It was the most skillful thing she had ever done (and if she was completely honest with herself, probably not something she would ever be able to reproduce). But more than that, it felt like she was actually _doing something_, for once. This was something she was good at. She could win the Hunger Games if she really wanted to.

The Gamemakers gave her an eleven.

Then they gave Katniss Everdeen a _twelve_.

* * *

><p>That night on the roof, she sat on Finnick's back while he did what seemed to be an infinite number of pushups. He was silent as she complained to him about everyone's favorite tributes. She had been doing so for the past hour.<p>

"You need to give those two a break, Jo," he finally said.

She sighed petulantly, then tumbled backwards as Finnick sat up.

"I'm serious.

And he was. At this point, he'd usually make a joke. It was obvious that Finnick liked the tributes from Twelve, but personal fondness had never stopped him from harmless mocking anyone with Johanna before.

She raised herself up onto her elbows and glared at him. He glared back, instead of casually insulting her. This was all wrong.

"None of this matters. There is so much more weighing on this than your petty issues with her that, frankly, I don't see how anything else could possibly matter. Even if there weren't, you don't understand what they've gone through over the past six months."

"I can only imagine what he's gone through, having to put up with her," she spat out venomously.

He looked at her, eyebrow raised, as though she had completely lost her mind. "Johanna, do you have a bizarre crush on that kid or something? Because you are acting absolutely insane."

She responded with a short, mean laugh as she stood up. "I don't think I'm even capable of having a "crush". Plus, he's too…"

"Decent?" he looked… seriously angry.

"Yeah. I like my men bitter." She actually had no idea how she liked her men, since, contrary to popular belief, she had rather limited experience in that arena.

He frowned at her then snorted and shook his head, "Otherwise they remind you of–"

"Finnick Odair, don't you even think about bringing that up." Her own mood went from irritated to grim. He needed to stop now.

But he wouldn't. "You wanna hate Katniss? Fine. Just let me ask you one question: How would you have reacted if the Capitol _forced _you to marry–"

She slapped him as hard as she could across the face. Spinning on her heel, she began to run away, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her back. With one hand, he held her hands, and with the other he covered her mouth to stop her from shouting. And he was strong, so much stronger than she could ever be, that she couldn't do a thing about it. The soft, gentle feelings for him that she had toyed with the night before evaporated.

He was breaking all the rules, the only rules she had. He was her _best friend. _He was supposed to _know better_.

"You were sixteen, Johanna. You had just killed four people. You didn't know how you felt about him," he hissed into her ear. "You hadn't had time to feel anything. Everything you knew had suddenly gone to hell. But there was _something _there that you were trying to figure out." She squirmed as hard as she could, but he just gripped her tighter. "What if they had made him get down on one knee in front of everyone in the entire country and propose before you had? What if saying yes was the only thing you could do to save your mother?"

She tried to bite his fingers, but his hand was pushing too hard for her to even open her lips. Her body shook. Finnick completely ignored the hate and tears that flowed from her eyes and continued. His voice grew louder.

"Do you know what Snow is doing to these two? Do you get it? You don't."

"I know all about rape. _All about it_. But at least when they take your body, there's a chance that your mind can still be whole, still be yours. Your hopes, dreams, loves are yours to keep no matter what they do. But you can force someone without ever touching them. You can force them in much worse ways, if you're powerful enough."

"Katniss is just like you. She never had a minute to think about love, to imagine what it would be like to love someone, to dream about it, and then to live in sweet hope that maybe someday it would happen. And now, she never will. Being in love with that boy is so tied to her survival that I can promise you she has no idea whether it is real or not. This will _always_ be what her first love is: a monstrosity played out in front of cameras to keep them both alive."

Johanna tried so hard to get away but she couldn't break free from the steel grip of Finnick's arms. She hated him for making her think about this. She hated him with every fiber of her being.

"And Peeta," his voice cracked for just a moment, and she could feel his body start to shake, "he has loved Katniss _his entire life_. Maybe, if Snow had just let them alone after the Games Katniss would realize that she really did care about him. Maybe she would have left him. Either way, she would have had a choice. He would have had a choice. But that's not what happened. Instead, he has to marry her, knowing that her acceptance can never be anything other than a show for the Capitol by the sheer nature of the fact that it was forced on them."

What had started out as a harsh whisper became louder and louder with every word Finnick said. He was working himself into a rage. He was filled with more fury than she had ever imagined he had the capacity to hold.

"You know why I can't marry Annie; why I won't marry her. But they don't have that luxury. Snow will make them have children together. That alone is going to nearly kill that boy, having her when he knows she has no choice. But if they don't, Snow will kill Primrose, or Peeta's family, or half the population of District Twelve. Whatever he wants, because he can. Then he will hold those babies over their heads as ironclad collateral. They won't be able to sneeze without asking his permission. But you _know_ what happens to the children of Victors come Reaping Day."

"Once Snow takes every other thing they can possibly give, once he takes their lives, their love, and their children, on top of all of that, _he will kill that girl's sister anyway_, and it will all have been for _nothing_. _**So cut them a fucking break**_."

She stopped struggling. Her body felt like there was no blood left in it. He was right. It was all so unbearable that her finely erected system of mental partitions exploded into ash that blew into every corner of her mind. All of the censored thoughts raged free, and the nightmares that she could never really escape began to choke her. There was no one to kill, no one to stop. No one but Snow, and she might as well try to pull down the stars, he was so far from her reach. There was nothing she could do. Nothing was ever going to get better. Momma was dead, and she had killed her.

No.

She was not going to think about this. Not about any of this. Not about him or her or them or babies or sisters or any of the things that you loved and were taken away. She wanted to die. She still wanted to die, four years later. She wanted everyone to die, because at least that would be better than this.

Finnick at her looked like he had just broken the world.

"Jo, I am sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

He let her go and she collapsed onto her knees, coughing out the sobs that had been held back by his hand. Sliding to the ground beside her, Finnick buried his head in his hands. They didn't touch each other. The wind howled, and it drowned out the sound of their pain.

It might have been hours later when she asked, "So this love thing they have going on isn't real then?" Her voice was so cracked and raw she barely recognized it.

"It wouldn't be so painful to think about if it were fake. It's just… complicated."

Still crying but now also laughing in a confused gurgle, she blurted out, "I guess it's a good thing for them we're all dying pretty soon then."

"I told you Jo, we're getting out. Wait until the interviews. You'll see," Finnick whispered. He didn't sound sure, but he reached out and pulled her close to him, laying her head against his chest.

"I'll believe it when I see it."


	13. Freeze

The next day, she woke up on her couch, held under Finnick's arm, face buried in his chest, and with no recollection of how she got there. She had a hangover from crying, which had to be the worst possible kind of hangover in the world. Finnick himself was still asleep, one arm flung under his head and dangling off the edge of the couch. Clenched in his fist was a delicate shell with a chipped edge. On the inside, just visible under the curve of his thumb, was a small heart drawn by a wavering hand.

Johanna sat up abruptly, turned, and rammed her head straight into Blight's stomach.

Anders stood next to him. Both looked stern.

"Tell us what's going on."

Just like that, Finnick was awake. "Ahh, good morning, all. I need to get going, prepare for my interview tomorrow. I have a poem to write."

Anders looked confused, and just the slightest bit disgusted. Blight's expression did not change.

Finnick strode forward and with an uncharacteristic clumsiness, knocked a bottle of juniper berry liquor into the communication console. The other two men in the room glared daggers at him. They had planned on spending the day drinking that.

"Sorry. Must be the pre-Games jitters. Johanna, I'll leave you to it. See you later everyone!"

As the door closed behind him, she crossed her arms and gave her mentor and fellow tribute an appraising look.

"How do you boys feel about causing some good old-fashioned trouble?"

Blight smiled.

* * *

><p>The rest of the day passed in a blur. She spent a great deal of the morning explaining to Anders and Blight all she knew about the revolution. Neither seemed particularly surprised, but, like her, they doubted the reliability, or even the existence of District Thirteen.<p>

"Even if they do exist, they've been letting us rot for the better part of a fucking century." Blight was, of course, right, but what else were they supposed to do? She told them as much.

"Well, Johanna, all the two of us have is you. You're not a hell of a lot, but we're not gonna let you do this alone."

"Anders, you're a sentimental fool."

The old man picked up another bottle of liquor. "Gonna take a nap now," Blight said.

And that was that. They were in.

At one point, she went on the roof, but through the elevator doors she saw Peeta and Katniss having a _moment_. Remembering what Finnick had said, she let them have it. Wandering past the twelfth floor penthouse, she overheard Effie and Haymitch arguing. She peeked around the door just in time to see Haymitch push the woman into the wall, growling, "Shut your mouth, _princess_," and then he was kissing her senseless as her gold fingernails frantically raked through his hair.

Things were clearly getting desperate.

So this was it: very possibly the last free day of her life, and she was completely alone. Finnick wanted to be alone, or with Mags, otherwise he would have found her already. Haymitch was _occupied_. And after what she'd just seen, she wasn't about to go looking for Nuts and Volts, or Seeder and Chaff. For all she knew, they were all just screwing like rabbits. Blight was asleep. Anders was drunk. Everyone else was old or high or both. She did not want to spend her last hours wandering aimlessly around the Training Center.

But that's exactly what she was doing.

She ended up in the basement somehow. No one seemed to care about locking doors this year, since the tributes were not just a bunch of dumb kids. They all knew what would happen to them if they stepped out of line. So with no one stopping her, she wandered through rooms filled with old costumes from previous years. Some of them were yellowed with age. A lot of them smelled awful, covered with the sweat of terrified children going to their deaths.

Behind the last door in the farthest corner of the building, she found Cinna, bent over a machine, sewing a black feathered gown.

"Johanna. What are you doing here?" he asked softly, looking up from his work.

"You let Katniss wear one of my dresses on the Victory Tour," she said in lieu of an answer.

"I did," he admitted, looking back to his work. "They insisted on something more dramatic, and that was all that I had."

"It would have looked better on me," she glowered.

"Of course it would have. It was made for you."

"The last pretty thing I wear before I die is going to be some awful rag Lavinia made." She didn't know why her voice sounded like that of a frightened twelve-year-old.

Cinna said nothing in response for a moment, then, as though just remembering, off-handedly remarked, "Oh, yes. Portia took something up to Lavinia just a few minutes ago, actually. A little snack to help with the food poisoning."

"My stylist has food poisoning?"

"Not yet," Cinna stood up.

"Now, let's see. Your measurements are basically the same as they were last year, right?"

Johanna smiled.

"Well then, I have just the thing. Let me finish this up, but I promise, I will bring it to you in the morning."

Her prep team hadn't even arrived the next morning when he knocked on her door with the dress.

It took her breath away. Deep emerald, it had a dramatically low back, flowing skirt, and the most delicate straps imaginable. Every time she moved, it shimmered like a forest river in late summer. Once she had it on, he did her makeup, though her prep team could have easily done so.

After he left, she could see why. On the apple of right cheek, right under her eye, Cinna had drawn four tiny stripes. They were a ruddy brown, the color of dried blood.

"Thank you," she whispered to the empty room.

This was the kind of getup she'd be okay dying in.

* * *

><p>She saw Finnick for the first time in twenty-four hours as they gathered backstage for their interviews. He wore a light blue suit and a dark blue shirt unbuttoned at the top. It made his eyes glow. Mags stood next to him in a flowing dress of purple and teal. When they stood close together, you could see all of the colors of the sea.<p>

"Finish your poem?" Johanna asked.

Finnick was clutching something in his fist, and his grip grew tighter when he heard the question. She knew it was the shell. At this point, she knew who had given it to him. "For now," he answered softly. Then, he looked past her shoulder and his face grew cloudy.

"I can't believe Cinna put you in that thing," he said in disgust to whoever was behind her.

She turned to see Katniss dressed in what would have normally been a glorious, Capitol wedding gown. Under these circumstances, though, it was an atrocity. And no one seemed to know it more than the boy dressed in a tuxedo beside her. He looked everywhere but at the girl on his arm. Every inch of his body betrayed the absolute misery that he fought to keep Katniss from noticing. Finnick reached over and squeezed his shoulder wordlessly.

Then Cashmere said something cruel, and Johanna found herself wanting to beat the stupid bitch into a pulp. Because for once, Katniss just looked like what she really was – a sad, confused girl in so far over her head she was drowning. Johanna wanted to rip the dress off her, grind it into the ground, and somehow fly her away from all of this.

Without thinking, she reached out and gently adjusted the girl's strand of pearls.

"Make him pay for it, okay?"

Katniss' look of shocked gratitude spoke volumes.

And then it was time to start. Everything felt rushed, but she had been so distracted before her last Games. Maybe this is how things always felt the day before you were going to die.

Cashmere and Gloss surprised her with their impassioned speeches. Finnick had reached out to them, and they had been decidedly uninterested in any sort of challenge to the status quo. However, they were apparently equally uninterested in going back into the arena, and appealed to the Capitol's sentiment by fondly recalling all the kindness they'd been shown.

Beetee managed to go into a five point analysis of the legality of the current Quarter Quell, based on the wording of the Treaty of Treason. It probably made a lot of sense to him and other brilliant scientific minds, but knowing Capitol citizens like she did, Johanna doubted many of them understood a word of it. She certainly didn't. His effort was not without merit though, as he wedged open the door to sympathy that Cashmere and Gloss had cracked just a bit further.

The poem Finnick had written was about Annie, she knew. No one in the Capitol did, though, and the raging, aching love and loss that his words evoked seemed somehow personal to everyone in the crowd who had ever loved him in person, or even from a distance. Several women in the front row fainted, and for good reason. The poem was staggeringly poignant. Johanna knew then, more than she had ever known before, that the Finnick who had been her best friend was gone forever. They couldn't just be two broken people, struggling through the world, and leaning on each other from time to time. If they somehow both made it out alive, he was Annie's now. She had to let him go. The sense of loss was cold and bitter.

Or, maybe they would all be dead soon, and it wouldn't matter.

Then it was quite unexpectedly her turn. She wanted to scream at the audience, to rip out their implants and set fire to their clothes. Nothing would have pleased her more than to grab Caesar Flickerman's lavender hair and smash his face into the side of the stage. How was she going to pull this off? She could act like she was scared and weak – that was no problem. She could be the Victor who was so casual with her body that it became just a given assumption that she spread herself around. She could even pretend to be in love with Finnick Odair, because, really, if they had been living some other life, and she hadn't been so broken and lost, maybe it would have been something she might have been capable of feeling. But she didn't think she could do _this_. She couldn't pretend to care about these people.

The sea of spectators rose before her, threatening to crush her. Caesar looked at her warmly and said something about how lovely she looked in her dress, just how _much _of it there was this year. She was going to throw up.

No.

It was time to think about some things. She was going to die anyway.

_I killed four children in cold blood. One of them, I slowly chopped to pieces. I killed my mother. I killed my mentor, maybe he was even my lover. No one needs me. No one will be broken if I die. I have nothing in the world I can possibly lose, because there is no one left I love. _

_Nothing matters to me. _

And suddenly it was all so easy.

"Well, Caesar, I thought that tonight deserved a more somber look," she said sadly, and he encouraged her to go on.

"I'm gonna be honest, I don't wanna be here. None of us do. I don't mean here in the Capitol. You all know what good times we've all had together. In fact, it's like… we've kinda become a _family_. But I don't wanna be here to go back into the Games, to have to kill these other amazing Victors - people that I respect. I don't think the original Gamemakers realized the sort of deep lasting bond that would develop among us when they made these rules for the Quell. They didn't anticipate how important the whole culture of Victors would be to Capitol society – how difficult it would be for you all to lose us. How difficult it would be for us to leave you."

Caesar shook his head sadly, "You know, Johanna. You have a point there. I don't know if they did think it through."

"No, they didn't," she looked straight into the cameras. "No one could be so cruel as to make us do this, if they really thought about it."

And then it was over. She felt light and airy, not like someone who had just sold her soul. Cashmere and Gloss nodded grimly at her as she passed them, and Finnick grasped her hand tightly.

"I'm so proud of you."

"Yeah. Nice poem. I think I even _cried._"

He punched her in the shoulder.

The rest of the interviews passed in a blur. Blight said nothing, as usual, but some of the other tributes picked up where she had left off, asking if Snow could just change the rules, since he seemed to have so much power. Then saying that maybe he just _refused _to. And somehow Katniss' dress transformed in a burst of flames, leaving her dressed as the bird that the protesters had painted on their signs. The crowd went wild with anguish at the demise of her wedding, but it was still not enough.

She saw Peeta stand alone, off to the side. He watched Katniss, dressed as his bride, and his eyes were alight. It was in his face; he was in another world, imagining, maybe, what it would mean if somehow all of the pageantry he had been forced to go through was for something real. For just a moment, the tortured look was gone, and he looked so peaceful he might have been asleep.

Then he took a deep breath and stepped onto the stage, slowly walking forward with just the hint of an uneven gait.

And he spoke of his deepest, most precious dream as though it were true.

A baby.

He returned to his wife's side, and held her hand. Then somehow they were all holding hands. Blight's was sweaty.

The audience was inconsolable. They began ripping out the seating, and throwing it across the room, demanding this stop. Some of them pulled lighting fixtures from the walls, bringing the place into darkness but for the glow of the emergency lights. Groups of them ran out of the exits. Through the open doors, Johanna could see destruction, and smoke everywhere.

The Capitol was rioting against the Hunger Games.

* * *

><p>Katniss and Peeta were pushed out of an exit, and Haymitch was suddenly among them. He ripped a gold bracelet off his arm and gave it to Finnick.<p>

"Your token. Make sure she can see it. You have to keep Peeta alive. Without him, she'll just kill every single one of you... probably just go batshit crazy on top of that. I don't have to tell you that without her, we don't have a deal. You don't get out and we have no army to support this rebellion."

Grabbing Johanna's shoulders, he pulled her in so that their eyes were level.

"She wants Beetee and Wiress. _You_ have to keep them alive. Without them, she won't trust you. Plus, without Beetee's trick, we can't get you out. Chaff and Seeder will try to keep One and Two away. They'll try to get to you in time, but don't wait for them. Don't wait for anybody."

Effie was pulling him away, whispering in his ear, before she was yanked in another direction by a group of Peacekeepers wearing some kind of mask.

"Count the bread!" was the last thing Haymitch shouted before Effie broke free and pushed him through the closing doors of an elevator.

The crowd surged around them while more masked Peacekeepers poured in from every entrance. They grabbed her and pulled her away from Finnick. The room felt like it was crushing against them. She heard Finnick frantically calling for Mags, and Effie shouting for someone to _take his hands off_ her. A canister rolled by their feet, a sweet-smelling gas spilling from it.

Nothingness took her after that.

* * *

><p><em>After the funeral, she moved in with Needles. The Capitol rebuilt her house, but she refused to go back. The money still came once a month, but it was delivered to the rebuild house. If she wanted it she had to go inside and open the new safe. A fairly obvious message from Snow, letting her know that she was still his Victor, and she could never be anything else.<em>

_There was no real purpose in her life, and she had nothing with which to occupy herself. The Games were over, and she had won. She had somehow managed to kill her mother twice. She was rich and alone. What did you do after that? She folded paper and cut down trees. She chopped the wood into kindling and left it out so people would steal it. She stopped caring what anyone thought about how she looked and stopped wearing the appropriate amount of clothing in most situations. _

_She trained. Every day she ran five miles, and then exercised her muscles until she could barely move. Needles never asked her why she was training. She wouldn't have even known how to answer. At nightfall, she went into town and tried to provoke drunken lumberjacks to fight her or give her a reason to hit them, but it rarely worked, so she often just roamed the town and the forest._

_She cut off almost all of her hair leaving it in uneven and spiky. _

_Every night, when she finally came home, she slept on the couch, though the house was full of bedrooms. Even had it not been, she knew deep down that Needles would have gladly welcomed her into his bed. But she didn't want his comfort. Not after what her mother had been killed in exchange for._

_About a month after the funeral, a period in which she had done nothing but ignore him, she came home to find Needles sitting at the kitchen table, shivering. A strange blue pallor covered his skin. When she touched his forehead, she felt it burning with fever. Terror consumed her. He was all she had left, and she wasn't even sure what he meant to her yet. He couldn't. Not like this._

"_No, Needles no. You have to fight it." _

_He had smiled slightly, coughed, and said, "I never was much of a fighter, Johanna."_

_Healers came, felt his burning forehead, and turned away sadly. Without being asked, or even informed of the situation, Finnick Odair sent a doctor from the Capitol. Despite being the best in her field, she was completely bewildered by symptoms she had never seen before. She injected him with the most advanced infection-defeating drug she knew of, but it did nothing._

_Needles McCallister, largely forgotten Victor of the 66__th__ Hunger Games died three days later from an extremely aggressive infection that no one understood._

_But to Johanna Mason, who had sat by his side, holding his shivering hands, caressing his bluish skin, and singing songs to him in a horribly off-key voice, it appeared that he froze to death._


	14. Tick Tock

**.**

**Hickory, dickory, dock**

**The mouse ran up the clock**

**The clock struck one and down he run**

**Hickory, dickory, dock.**

There was no one to wait with her in the Launch Room. Lavinia was busy throwing up somewhere, thanks to Cinna. Her prep team hadn't been allowed to come, nor had she wanted them there. Anders was in the Control Module, probably, and that could have been hundreds of miles away, for all she knew. She was alone, but unlike the previous evening, she liked it. No one was there to see the nervous, excited energy that thrummed through her. No one was there to be disturbed by how eager she seemed to get back into the arena.

After months, years, even, of confusion, wandering around broken, this at least was something she knew how to do. Kick some ass, or die. Either way, it was better than sitting. She stood on the metal plate and the glass cylinder descended around her.

_Let's see what you got, Enobaria, _she thought, as she rose into the air.

She didn't really expect to be surrounded by salt water, but it didn't matter much - she knew how to swim. She had found herself with a lot of spare time on her hands after winning her Games, and Seven was full of streams and rivers. To her left was one of the morphling addicts from Six, and to her right was Mags. Neither one of them was about to knife her, so when the gong went off, she did a cannonball into the water almost gleefully.

Might as well get her kicks while she could.

She had one job, and that was to find Nuts and Volts and keep them from getting killed. It was in every way the opposite of the strategy from her previous Games, but after spending three years training almost every day, not to mention all of the other disasters that had taken place, she felt like a significantly different person. She also needed to find Blight before he managed to get himself skewered by Brutus. Scanning the area, she saw Beetee on the other side of the addict from Six. Next to him was Cecelia, and beyond her looked to be Seeder.

He was safe, for now, but she had no idea where Wiress was. She hoped that wherever it was, it wasn't anywhere near someone from One or Two. Taking a deep breath, she ducked her head under the water so she could swim faster and be less of a target, but her belt held her waist above the water. With this in mind, she lifted her head and pulled herself forward with long strokes. Beetee was watching her intently. With a nod of realization he jumped off of his plate and slowly paddled towards the Cornucopia.

He'd better not get himself killed while she was off finding his crazy friend.

Wiress was all the way at the other side, and Johanna was beginning to feel the stress of all the time she was wasting trying to find her. The bloodbath was probably in full force, and anything worth having was probably already gone. On her way around, she had run into Blight who was slowly doggy paddling towards the Cornucopia and sent him back to track Beetee down. When she reached the woman from Three's plate, she found her frantic.

"Come on down, Nuts. The belt will help you float," she called out, but Wiress refused to move. Her eyes rolled back and forth, as though the arena had completely overstimulated her already. Johanna wondered with annoyance how the crazy broad had ever managed to win her Games. There wasn't time for more thoughtful contemplations of that nature though, so she just grabbed the woman's leg and yanked her into the water. She quickly became aware of a few things.

First of all, Wiress did not like to swim. Secondly, Wiress _really _did not like to be touched.

With a grunt, Johanna began dragging the older woman through the water towards the Cornucopia, as she kicked and screamed the entire time, splashing everywhere. Anyone within a mile radius could probably see them. It wasn't an ideal situation, but at least she had Blight looking after Beetee. It was useful to have a quiet, compliant man around. Especially when he was as big as the side of a house like Blight was.

When she arrived on land, Wiress refused to stand up, so Johanna just slung her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The woman began to kick and scream once more, howling things that did not make sense at all, like "approach from the rear" and "attack vectors" and Beetee's name over and over. Near the Cornucopia, Blight was digging through the weapons, looking for an axe big enough for his hands. Beetee was on his haunches, agitatedly searching through another pile, until he pulled out a small spool and cried out, "Aha!"

His exclamation turned into a yelp, when the tribute from Ten, who had snuck up while they weren't paying attention, stabbed him in the back. Johanna dropped Wiress onto her feet and broke into a run. The woman simply stood where Johanna put her, crying out, "Too late! Too late!" Blight finally found his axe and with an impressive roar, drove it halfway through the man from Ten's skull.

Beetee had fallen onto his side, and shook uncontrollably as his jumpsuit soaked through with blood. There was nothing to staunch the bleeding on the barren expanse of sand and not even their clothing would work as a decent bandage, so Johanna just gestured for Blight to pick the man up, and, after quickly grabbing a hatchet for herself, she drug a struggling Wiress back into the water, toward the beach.

* * *

><p>The jungle was oppressively hot and humid, and none of them were adapting to it well. Blight, especially, used to the rainy, cool climate of Seven, was beginning to show signs of confusion as his body struggled to acclimate itself. It didn't help that he had probably twice as much muscle mass as the rest of them, or that he was carrying Beetee.<p>

Wiress was extremely disturbed by her district partner's injury. She walked too close to Blight, shoulders hunched, muttering things that no one could make out. Johanna tried to ask if she was okay, but the woman wouldn't make eye contact. When Johanna spoke to her, she just increased the volume of her muttering, as though she were trying to drown out the sound. Her constant presence might have been wearing on Blight, but his face stayed stony and he said nothing.

Something had not been right with this woman well before she ever won the Hunger Games.

Despite the humidity, there was no rain and no water to be found. There were a few different leaves which Johanna recognized as edible, so she and Blight ate them in an attempt to hydrate themselves. Beetee was too weak to eat, and Wiress simply refused.

They had no real idea where they were going, simply that they had to get to water before Beetee's extensive blood loss got to him. They had tried to bind his wounds with enormous leaves they found, but neither of them were particularly adept at healing, and Johanna didn't think they had done much good at all.

This was not how she had anticipated these Games to play out.

Where was Finnick? With District Twelve, no doubt. Since their bodies hadn't been near the Cornucopia, she was just going to assume they were alive. The alternative was pretty dire and, frankly, would render pointless her current attempts at preserving the lives of Beetee and Wiress. She found herself missing him, and once again a wave of envy for Katniss' position overcame her. Strategically, Finnick was the most powerful ally a person could possibly have in this arena, both just for his physical abilities, as well as his appeal to sponsors. Allied with Katniss and Peeta, Finnick could probably get enough sponsor support for a hovercraft.

Come to think of it, that was kinda the whole point of this rebellion thing.

Angry and jealous and thirsty, Johanna stopped where she was and threw down her axe.

"Might as well make camp here, Blight," she grumbled. "We're not gonna find more water tonight anyways, and you look like you're gonna keel over any minute now."

He nodded and gently but unceremoniously deposited Beetee onto the ground.

"Nuts and I will keep watch. Go to sleep. And keep him warm, otherwise he's gonna go into shock. She's not gonna do it. She won't touch anyone."

She could almost hear him saying "Are you _fucking_ kidding me?" with the look he gave, but he kept it to himself and lay awkwardly next to the older man without argument. A few minutes later, both men were asleep.

The growing darkness had gathered and fallen around them, but Johanna didn't want to risk a fire. Thankfully now that they weren't moving anymore, and maybe because she couldn't see anything to be overwhelmed by, Wiress had calmed down. She settled herself about three feet away from Johanna.

"He's scared…" she whispered into the blackness.

Johanna whipped her head around, surprised at her coherence. Of course, it was too dark to see anything, so she had no idea what sort of face Wiress was making.

She barked out a quiet, bitter laugh. "I'd be scared too, if I was slowly bleeding to death."

"No… not him. He's too hurt to be..." she trailed off.

"You mean Blight's scared?"

Wiress didn't respond, but she didn't need to.

"Yeah, Nuts, I bet he is. Hell, we all are." She was becoming a bit disturbed by this conversation, but she wasn't certain why.

"Not you. You're just…"

_Angry_.

The word hung between them, but remained unsaid.

"I don't have anything left to be afraid of. No one can hurt me anymore." She was in the Games, her family was dead, all of her friends were doomed to die. Anything Snow could do to her he had basically already done. Of course, when she really considered where thinking like that had gotten her before…

Wiress' hushed voice interrupted her thoughts, and chilled her to the bone.

"He still can…"

* * *

><p>Midnight finally arrived, with the comforting assurance that Finnick was not dead. The anthem woke both Blight and Beetee. After it was over, Blight told her to sleep, and kept watch with Wiress who refused to lie down under any circumstances. Johanna lay next to Beetee and fell into an uneasy slumber as the older man twitched and quivered. It had definitely not been enough time for any sort of real rest, when the sound of violent thunder roused her.<p>

"What's going on?" she asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

"Storm's comin'," Blight said.

The thought of water was more tempting than the idea of sleep, "Better come soon."

Next to her, Beetee groaned and tried to sit up.

"Don't. Your back's a mess. Finally stopped bleeding, but it might start again if you move around too much."

"Where's Wiress?" he croaked.

"She's right here, and fine. Well, mostly. Not exactly fond of swimming, though."

The older man cracked a small smile that she could see as the lightning flashed. Then his eyes grew cloudy.

"My wire?" he moaned anxiously.

"We kept it safe. It's on your belt. Figured it must be worth something for you to get yourself nearly killed over it. You're a pain in the ass to protect, Volts."

But the old man was either asleep or unconscious again, and he did not reply.

An enormously bright flash of lightning ripped through the sky then all was silent. The jungle grew dark once more.

"Tick tock," Wiress whispered as the patter of rain approached them.

Johanna felt her body relax, despite the fact that her ally seemed hell-bent on creeping them all out. Soon she would be covered in fresh, clean water. There was nothing better. She pulled a leaf off of a tree to serve as a channel from which she could drink.

"Pick up Volts, Blight. We need to find better shelter if we can."

The first heavy droplets landed against her skin, and she sighed happily. Holding the leaf to her mouth, she leaned back her head to drink the rain that was beginning to pour on them in earnest. Instead of being refreshing, what trickled into her mouth was hot and thick and tasted bitterly of iron. Johanna spit as hard as she could.

It was raining _blood_.

Curtains of it fell around them, coating their skin, clothes, and hair. It was without question the most disgusting thing she had ever experienced. It dripped into her eyes, and she couldn't rub them clean because it was just everywhere. The only thing that had made them visible in the blackness, the faint reflection of their skin, disappeared. She could see nothing but the sticky blackness, hear nothing but the sound of it as it fell from the sky.

"**Fuck**." Blight cursed. Beetee's inert body slipped out of his arms, then he slipped and fell as well.

Wiress wailed.

Feelings of panic began to bubble up in Johanna's chest, but she pushed them down. "We've gotta get out of this!" she shouted out the obvious, attempting to grab some sort of control over the situation.

She could hear Blight slipping and sliding around as he tried to stand again. They needed to find the unconscious Beetee who had disappeared into the ground. She walked in Blight's direction, and tripped over the old man. A few feet away, Wiress continued to wail in one long, unbroken note.

"Nuts that _isn't helping right now_," Johanna screamed in fury. Everything was going to hell. The panic was beginning to take over.

"Where is he?" Blight shouted from quite a distance away.

_Comebackcomebackcomeback_.

"Blight, get your ass back here! We need to stay together! I have them!"

"I hate this damn—"

There was a zap, and for an instant they could see a treeless, rainless space illuminated by the shining moon, like a portal to another world.

Then there was a dull thud as Blight's body slammed against a tree.


	15. Blood

**I'm sorry about how long it has taken to update this (well, I guess a week and a half is not THAT long, but after updating every other day, it's a rather sudden change). My younger sibling "borrowed" my copy of **_**Catching Fire**_** without telling me, and I needed it to write the next chapter(s), for reasons that I think will be pretty apparent. By the way, any discrepancies you notice between the book and this story may be intentional. I see Katniss as a pretty unreliable narrator. Anyway, after realizing the book wasn't coming back in the immediate future, I bought the damn thing for my Kindle so I could move forward. Hopefully, there won't be any more gaps, although I think my update schedule will probably be closer to twice a week than three times a week from now on. A further note, for people who may be of a more delicate disposition: This story will **_**eventually**_** switch to an M rating, but I won't tell you why or when. This is the only warning I'm going to give, because, you know, spoilers. Enough writer's-noting. On to the main event. - sc**

* * *

><p>"Get up Blight! Get up!"<p>

But he wouldn't.

Leaving the tributes from Three huddled together several feet away, Johanna had scrambled to the place where she last saw him slam into the tree, and fell to her knees by his body. She couldn't really see him; she could only fumble around, trying to find a pulse, the faint brush of a breath, any sort of indication that he was not dead. As she ran her hands around his neck in an attempt to locate his carotid artery, she noticed the odd angle of his dangling head.

His neck was definitely broken. There was no pulse, no breathing, no nothing. He might have been dead before he even hit the tree.

Blight was dead for the stupidest reason imaginable. She didn't even know that force fields could kill people like this, or that they could have possibly come to the end of the arena so soon. In this blood rain, how in hell were they supposed to see well enough to keep from hitting another one?

She tried to gather enough emotions together to mourn him, the man with whom she and Anders had formed a bizarre brotherhood of misery, but found herself unable to feel anything, not even rage. At least he had gone quickly. The voice that had been on repeat since her name was drawn in the Quell reminded her that they were all going to end up like this soon enough. Then a feeble cough let her know that soon was coming pretty quickly for Beetee, as he, too weak to roll onto his back, was beginning to drown in the blood that poured over him.

She closed Blight's eyes. His axe was gone, lost in the blood-soaked underbrush. So was hers. They were completely exposed and entirely vulnerable. She was alone with a dying man and a woman who had clearly lost her mind. This was not how Johanna Mason operated. She did not _take care of people_. She took care of herself. The only other person she was concerned about was fully capable of managing on his own.

For a moment, as the hovercraft descended, she had a brief respite from the rain. Using the increased visibility, she seized Wiress' arm and dragged her towards her insensible district partner. "This is gonna be just perfect," she muttered, as her searching fingers found Beetee's collar and yanked him upwards, making blood run down his face instead of into his nose. They had two options: wander around blindly in the dripping dark, or wait to see if the rain ended. Given what had just happened to Blight, she decided on the latter. She forced Wiress to her knees, and then sat so that Beetee was leaning upright against them. The deranged woman did not struggle, or even seem to react to Johanna's touch. She just listed gently back and forth, singing an awful children's song over and over. The only other sound was that of the rain. She couldn't rest because Beetee had to be held upright, or he would drown. Even if that had not been the case, Wiress' endless babbling would have kept her awake.

Johanna wished she could say that this was the lowest point of her life.

She tried to distract herself by focusing on how much she absolutely _loathed_ Katniss Everdeen but her emotions were all somehow muted. Nothing felt like anything under the heavy streams of blood. Had there ever been anything other than this awful, interminable rain? She tried to remember what the forest looked like, or even the jungle that surrounded her, but everything seemed like a pleasant memory, too long lost to really recall.

Ultimately, although she had no real idea of how much time had passed, there was a bolt of lightning in the nothingness, and the blood rain stopped. Even without the constant, black downpour, it was still nearly impossible to see. The trio made their way infuriatingly slowly, as Johanna had to throw rocks or twigs or whatever else she could find in front of her to make certain that they weren't about to run into a force field. Wiress wandered in slow loops around them most of the time, but sometimes she would just stop, and sing the infuriating little song, refusing to go on. When this happened, Johanna had to stop, drop Beetee, and run back to drag the woman forward. The blood began to congeal on their bodies. It pulled at their skin, and made movement difficult. They couldn't get it out of their eyes, or the corners of their lips. The taste of it was constantly on their tongues.

They eventually came to an area that did not have the remnants of any blood rain, but Johanna decided to only skirt the edge, remaining in the red-crusted jungle. Without Blight, or even the smallest of weapons, she wasn't about to risk going into an area where Enobaria or Brutus might be lurking. The disgusting remains of the blood rain would, at least, protect them from any but the most desperate of tributes until they managed to find some water. The smell alone was growing increasingly worse, and she found herself retching occasionally. This slow dragging movement went on for hours, without a rest or a break. If she did not find water, or an ally, they were all going to die, which meant, by extension, that Finnick, Katniss, and Peeta would never get out of the arena.

In the absence of the numbing presence of the blood rain, Johanna's fury at the girl began to increase exponentially. Katniss had Finnick and she had Peeta, both of whom were probably making her laugh that very instant. She wasn't dragging some incapacitated old man through the jungle, trying desperately to keep him alive. The stupid little bitch probably had water. Oh water. She needed water. The thoughts piled on themselves until she was muttering them out loud, probably sounding as crazy as Nuts.

For hours Johanna plodded on, fueled by nothing more than her cold hatred of The Girl on Fire.

Or maybe it was it days? Years? It didn't matter. She dragged and threw, dragged and threw, sometimes with Beetee nearly awake enough to help. Other times, she simply heaved his unconscious body through the mire. All the while Wiress's voice, which had switched from singing to just repeating "Tick, tock," echoed in her ears. Long-dead faces danced at the edge of her mind, but she pushed them away again and again. She was exhausted. Thirsty. So damn thirsty. What had water even tasted like?

And then, somehow, she was standing in the dappled light at the edge of the jungle. Before her was the beach. Beetee, who had been helping to push himself along, slumped to the sand in exhaustion, causing her to trip.

That was it.

She lashed out against Wiress, pushing her away. They were right back where they'd started. There was no drinkable water here. Nothing to help them. They were going to die of thirst, and then Finnick, and everyone else in this damn rebellion was going to suffer because of her death. She was going to end up killing even more people, even though she had just lugged these pathetic sacks of flesh through the jungle for an entire night without rest. She was going to lose her mind, just like Nuts, and wander around until Enobaria found her and ripped her throat out with those disgusting teeth. Maybe she'd be thirsty too. Maybe she liked the taste of blood rain.

When she heard Finnick calling her name, she was certain that she had already gone insane. Apparently a night in the blood-soaked jungle was all it took to bring down the terrifying Johanna Mason. But it seemed to her that if she were really losing it, that her mind would have first forgotten that skin felt so damn crusty and uncomfortable from the layers and layers of dried blood that caked her entire body. She turned toward the voice she heard, and there he was, in his underwear, as though it was just a normal day in his penthouse.

"Finnick!" her voice rang out, alerting everyone within a mile radius of their presence.

"Tick, tock," Wiress cried, almost excitedly, which was a change from her monotonous tone.

Finnick was there in a flash, picking her up and spinning her in wide circles, "Oh Jo! Jo you're okay!" he laughed into her shoulder. His skin was a sickly green color, as though he had covered himself in the scum from a stagnant pond.

"What happened to you?" they both asked as Finnick stood her on her feet again.

"Blight and I managed to get them both out, and we headed into the jungle. I had just fallen asleep during his first watch, when we heard thunder." Katniss and Peeta, both a sickly green as well, came up beside her, as she continued. Katniss looked less than pleased to see her. Probably because she wanted all the damn attention to herself. "We thought it was rain, you know, because of the lightning, and we were all so thirsty. But when it started coming down, it turned out to be blood. Thick, hot blood. You couldn't see, you couldn't speak without getting a mouthful. We just staggered around, trying to get out of it. That's when Blight hit the force field." At the mention of his name, her chest felt tight, like somewhere deep down there were a host of sobs trying desperately to get out.

Finnick's eyes were pained, "I'm sorry, Johanna."

This was no time for this. If they allowed just a bit of this sadness in they would all be utterly useless. "Yeah, well, he wasn't much, but he was from home," she tried to downplay what had happened, but it just made her sound even more vulnerable than she had before. "And he left me alone with these two. This one," she kicked Beetee a little, "he got a knife in the back at the Cornucopia. And her–"

Wiress had not changed tactics. She was now walking in an endless circle, saying "Tick, tock," as though they were still lost in the jungle.

"Yeah, we know, Tick, tock. Nuts is in shock," Johanna spat out. Used to the angry sound of Johanna's voice being followed by a yank in her direction, Wiress automatically headed towards the noise, and slammed into the younger woman. In a rage, Johanna pushed her to the beach and told her to stay there.

Katniss stepped forward, steely eyes set and angry, "Lay off her!"

The stupid brat had just had Finnick and another adult man help her get through the jungle which appeared to have been free of blood rain, and she had the absolute gall to tell Johanna to _lay off_ after she had been dragging those two for hours by herself?

That was it.

"_Lay off her_?" Before she even consciously decided to do it, Johanna's hand was slapping the younger girl as hard as she could across the face. "Who do you think got them out of that bleeding jungle for you? You–"

There were so many wonderfully offensive ways she could have ended the sentence, but she was cut off by Finnick's strong arms picking her up and throwing her over his shoulder. She kicked her legs in the air, and pounded her arms against his back as hard as she could, but he was still Finnick. Still the strongest. An instant later, Johanna found herself being dunked repeatedly into the salt water.

"You stuck up little–!" she shouted in the space between dunks before water filled her mouth.

"Peeta must be blind and stupid to have married your sorry–!" again she tried.

"I bet you don't even put out, you frigid little–!" this definitely was true. That girl was absolutely a virgin and the kid was a liar. But if they hadn't been, well, that gave her another idea.

"Your bastard kid is going to have–!" Finnick held her underwater for a really long time after that one. It was pretty low, especially coming from someone who didn't actually know who her father was.

"I'm going to kick your scrawny–!" this was just pathetically uncreative, but she was starting to black out. Her arms and legs flailed feebly, and she could hear Finnick chuckle just a little bit.

Finally, it was over.

"Are you going to play nice now?" he asked sardonically, as he stood her upright in the water. There was a hitch to his voice that Johanna couldn't help but notice, though. Mags was nowhere in sight. Something was terribly wrong. Of course, they _were_ all in the arena again, so "terribly wrong" was basically to be the name of the game at this point.

"Take off your jumpsuit and everything else. You need to rinse it out while you can dry in the sun."

She stripped casually, as he warily kept guard, one hand on his trident, face set and grave. He was not making any jokes about her taking off her clothes whatsoever. It was different. Strange. Then she realized she had never spent any time with Finnick in battle. Was he not the same in the arena? Normally, he would have mocked her blood-covered ass for a lot longer than this. Was he always this serious, or was it the obvious loss of Mags that seemed to have drained the life from him?

"Come on. Let's get you food and water," he said distantly as she pulled her wet, stained undergarments back on. Even uniformly and disgustingly brown as they were now, they were basically see-through, but no one gave a damn at this point, even Katniss. Nothing anyone hadn't seen before.

For the next ten minutes, nothing else mattered but the sweet, sweet taste of water as it repeatedly flowed past her lips. Finnick was talking, telling her about the poison fog that had resulted in his sickly green color and the loss of their jumpsuits, as well as the monkeys that had killed one of the morphling-addicts but it was obvious that he was not telling the whole story, because Mags still wasn't there. There was no laughter, no anger, no anything in his voice. Just a cold, detached recitation. It was painful and unnerving.

After she had eaten enough to leave her stomach feeling like it was going to explode, Johanna found herself somehow keeping guard alone with Katniss on the beach. Despite having not really slept for almost twenty hours, she found herself unable to lie down and rest, and the other girl had insisted on joining her. The nervous energy that she had generated pulling Beetee through the jungle still thrummed through Johanna's veins, and she quite frankly would have been thrilled to use it to beat the Girl on Fire to a pulp. But unfortunately, that wasn't a current option.

Now was a good a time as any to ask.

"How'd you lose Mags?"

Katniss explained that she hadn't been strong enough to carry Mags through the fog, and Finnick could not have carried both her and the injured Peeta, who had somehow survived the force field when Blight had not, thanks to Finnick's help. Mags had committed suicide so that Peeta could live.

Did this stupid girl even have an inkling of what everyone had done for her and her hapless lover? The sacrifices they were making? That they'd continue to make? If Johanna and Blight had been with Finnick, instead of these two, Blight would still be alive. Mags would still be alive. Even Peeta – the only reason he was still around was because his presence was some sort of safeguard on Katniss' cooperation and sanity. But the girl didn't seem to have any clue. She just looked confused.

"She was Finnick's mentor, you know" Johanna said with all the venom of her thoughts behind it.

Katniss was struck by this. "No, I didn't," she responded. It was obvious she was thinking of her own mentor, and Johanna didn't even want to speculate about the complicated nature of that relationship. Haymitch had sent his precious tributes off to be the face of a rebellion without even telling them. Not really a situation to be jealous of.

"She was half his family," Johanna added, less angrily. She was still furious with Katniss and her absolute self-centered naïveté, but it was hard to logically hold on to that when she realized that it wasn't the brat's fault that she didn't know.

They watched the waves for some time before Katniss seemed to work up the courage to ask, "So what were you doing with Nuts and Volts?"

She really had no idea. A wave of frustration, this time directed at Haymitch, hit Johanna all over again. How were they supposed to get anything done if every step of the way, they had to provide a camera-friendly explanation to this constantly suspicious girl?

"I told you – I got them for you. Haymitch said if we were to be allies I had to bring them to you," says Johanna. "That's what you told him, right?" She hoped the girl was at least smart enough to play along.

With calculating eyes, the young girl nodded, while Johanna heaved an internal sigh of relief.

"Thanks, I appreciate it," Katniss added.

"I hope so," Johanna responded. This idiot had to be the biggest drag possible on her life.

And then Nuts was behind them, saying "Tick tock," for the one millionth time. Johanna did not have it in her to spend another second listening to the older woman's repetitive descent into madness. The exhaustion she had kept at bay for nearly an entire day suddenly began to push heavily down onto her shoulders.

"Oh, goody, she's back. Okay, I'm going to sleep. You and Nuts can guard together."

Katniss didn't have time to argue as Johanna made her way to Finnick's side, and let her body collapse beside his. At the sound, he curved his body towards her. They lay on their sides, foreheads and knees touching.

"Missed you, JoJo," he said groggily, smacking his lips as he woke.

"I'm really sorry about Mags," she whispered, breaking her rule of not bringing up the dead. It wasn't Finnick's rule, after all. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and then opened them to look intensely at her. Filled to the brim with unshed tears, they had to be one of the most pitiful sights she had ever seen. Reaching around his back, he picked up one of the woven water bowls and sat it over their heads, making a tiny little enclosure that no camera could see into. They had to be certain that no one could hear, either. To the Capitol audience, it probably just looked like the old lovers reconnecting.

"There's no one left to take care of Annie," he whispered with trepidation shot through his words.

In an uncharacteristically gentle act, Johanna lifted her hand and stroked his cheek, "She has you." It had the opposite effect than what she intended. Finnick's whispering voice grew hard.

"You need to promise me something."

She knew where he was going with this, and she cut him off right away. "Stop talking like that. They're getting us out, like you said."

But he wouldn't listen, and kept on pushing. Johanna, promise me you will make sure Annie is safe."

"Shut up, Finnick. You're getting out of here. And if you don't make it, I sure as hell won't," she hissed.

"Not just here. Do you think this is over once we get out of this arena? There's still a rebellion to be fought. There's no one else that can fight like me, except for maybe Brutus and hopefully he'll be dead soon. I can't just sit back and let other people do the work for our freedom when I am, no thanks to the Hunger Games, probably the most capable soldier in the country." He took her hand from his cheek and squeezed it hard, "_Promise_ me."

"Alright, alright. I promise," her assent calmed him considerably, and he loosened his grip her hand, but continued holding it and brought it to his chest. They remained there silently, face to face, and slowly began to drift off to sleep.

"Finnick?" she whispered drowsily.

"Yeah?" he yawned.

"Does that mean if you die I get to marry her?"

"Don't even think about it, Jo."


	16. Wire

Johanna was nestled in the small hollow where Finnick's neck met his collarbone when Katniss shook them both awake. Unexpectedly, the girl didn't look surprised or even concerned about the way they had been sleeping, as though friends just snuggled together in sleep on a pretty regular basis. Of course, if Johanna had been in a relationship as complicated as Finnick had figured Katniss' was, she probably wouldn't judge other people either. But there wasn't really much time for her to appreciate this, because Katniss was telling them that they had to move over and over again.

"It's a clock," she said, and then pulled out of thin air some ridiculous theory based on Nuts' ravings and the regular lightning strikes. Johanna was not buying it and just wanted to go back to sleep, but Finnick was more easily convinced. Peeta nodded as well, but it was pretty clear he'd do whatever Katniss wanted whenever she wanted it. A man who's decided to die doesn't much mind what part of the beach he does it on. His opinion didn't carry much weight with Johanna, but it seemed pointless for her to argue the point much, because every minute they spent doing that she wasn't getting any rest. Moving would, at least, shut Katniss up.

Of course, once Wiress woke and Katniss told her that she had finally figured out what the poor thing had been trying to say, the damn woman started functioning halfway normal again, making it look like Katniss definitely was right and Johanna had been some kind of merciless blood rain taskmaster. Nuts even let the younger girl touch her without throwing a tantrum – a _wondrous_ pleasure that Johanna had never been allowed. The older woman was communicating (sort of), eating, drinking, everything. It galled Johanna so obviously that Finnick noticed and chuckled to himself. To release her frustration, she began to stomp in impatient circles, until she realized that looping around like that had been what Nuts had just been doing, and she wasn't about to become the crazy one now that the older woman was acting like a human. Instead, she sat on the ground and pulled her jumpsuit back on, but leaving it unzipped, cinching it with the belt so that only her bottom half was covered.

As she dressed, she noticed that Peeta was struggling with Volts, who wanted that damn wire. Peeta hadn't seen it, and so didn't understand that the older man wasn't talking about his district partner.

"Oh, I know what he wants," she found the wire to show them, and then explained how Beetee had nearly gotten himself killed over it. She tried to downplay the item as stupid as much as she could, because she was pretty certain that this thing was the item that Plutarch had planted for them to bring down the force field. It'd be best if people in the Capitol didn't think too much about it. Peeta, of course, had to stand up for the old man, citing the method Volts used to win his Games a reason that the wire was not stupid at all. Katniss agreed with him, taking it so far as to suspiciously question why Johanna hadn't made the connection herself. Did these two morons _want _to get themselves killed?

"Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn't it?" Johanna began in a bemused voice. "I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were… what, again? Getting Mags killed off?" If she couldn't derail this conversation by telling the truth, insults would work as well.

Katniss' fingers tightened on her knife, and Johanna got in her face. The girl was begging for it at this point. "Go ahead. Try it. I don't care if you're knocked up, I'll rip your throat out." The two stared each other down for a tense moment until Finnick interrupted them, giving Volts the wire and directing them all to the Cornucopia. He gave Katniss a serious look, but left Johanna alone.

"I'm gonna kill her. I'm gonna kill her," she muttered under her breath over and over as the small group approached the shining gold horn.

Finnick just shook his head and laughed. Wiress started singing the song again. And then Volts was talking about sensing and canaries and all kinds of nonsense that Johanna barely cared about. It would have been incredibly annoying, had there not been an enormous pile of weapons gleaming in front of them. She dove in, desperate to find something that made her feel useful again.

"Mmm, girlies, I've missed you," she whispered when her fingers closed around the hafts of two stunning axes. Standing up, she held them up in the sunlight that sparkled on the wicked curves of the blades. With a quick twist of her body, one of them was buried three inches into the shiny gold of the Cornucopia. She chuckled to herself and then dug in the pile again to see what other delights might await her. In the end, she strapped three knives to her legs, and tucked a small hatchet into her belt. All the while, Nuts sang on and on. Johanna found herself humming along as she armed herself. The song revolved in her mind as Peeta showed them the map he had drawn, tried to figure out where and when exactly the next disaster was going to arrive. The loop in her head continued in such a way that she didn't even notice that Wiress herself had stopped singing until Katniss buried her first arrow in the side of Gloss' head.

Instinctually, Johanna let her axe fly into his sister's chest. Finnick was behind her, and she could see him diving towards Peeta as Brutus hurled a spear in the kid's direction. Enobaria was on him, stabbing him in the thigh with her knife, and then the two of them dove behind the Cornucopia. Johanna felt Katniss beside her, the two of them moving together seamlessly, poised to take out the threat if they could just get clear aim. For a moment, Johanna was shocked, and a bit pleased, at how good it felt to fight with someone who really knew what she was doing. She'd never done this before.

And then the world was pulled out from under her and everything began to spin. She dug her heels into the sand to keep her body from flying into the water and held on for dear life. When things finally stopped turning, Johanna's head did not. Everything became fuzzier, and the world started feeling like she had drank too much of Anders' liquor. While everyone else shakily returned to their feet, she asked, "Where's Volts?" in a wobbly voice.

Finnick dove into the water, and Katniss followed an instant later. From her position on the ground, Johanna could see Finnick dragging Beetee back towards the beach. Things were under control. She put her head in her hands to try to control the drunken feeling in her brain. It had been too long with too little sleep. One hour out of over twenty four, and most of the rest spent dragging an insensible man through the jungle. Her head felt like it was full of cotton. She assumed Wiress was dead.

Katniss emerged from the water and gave the old man his wire, then wrapped herself around Peeta. Finnick stood silently nearby.

They were mourning. There was no time for that.

"Let's get off this stinking island," she said, and lifted herself up.

After this moment, as they moved away from the Cornucopia things began to make less and less sense. Beetee and Finnick and Katniss were arguing about how the arena had shifted itself. When they came to no conclusion, Katniss began to berate herself for telling them about the clock in the first place. Johanna, in her muddled state, found herself actually trying to reassure her.

"You had to tell us or we never would have moved our camp in the first place, brainless."

Brainless.

That wasn't for her. How could that be for her? The last person to say that had been…

Then the conversation moved forward again, and Johanna tried to keep up but it was so damn difficult that she found herself jumping in at odd occasions. They were arguing about tapping trees or something, and Peeta wanted to help but Finnick refused to let him endanger himself. Peeta didn't get what was going on. For some reason, Johanna really didn't want to bring up the fact that with his leg and concern for Katniss he was probably the weakest link in the arena, other than Volts, who was nearly incapacitated by the awful combination of being old and stabbed in the back. So instead of telling him to sit his slow ass down, she suggested that Peeta try to draw a map of the arena, since he was the only one who could do so. It worked, and Finnick and Katniss slowly headed towards the trees. While Peeta drew, she crouched next to him, focusing on the lines and the shapes and trying to keep her mind from falling to pieces from fatigue. She was on the verge of collapse when a far-off scream sent a shock of adrenaline through her system.

Finnick and Katniss were off like a shot.

She scrambled to her feet, Peeta right behind her, but with her muddled senses and his prosthetic leg, they weren't quick enough to catch them. When they reached the section of the jungle from where the screams had originated, a solid wall of something that was _not_ a force field, kept them from following. Peeta pounded against the transparent barrier, yelling for Katniss at the top of his lungs. After some time, Beetee joined them. He looked at the invisible shield curiously, running the tip of a knife against the unseen resisting force.

Then Finnick and Katniss were back. Finnick ran straight into the wall and blood exploded from his nose, but Johanna could see nothing but the frantic despair in his eyes. The voice. The scream. It had to be Annie. There was no one else. As bird after bird landed around her two trapped allies, she realized what was happening, but the obvious source didn't seem to make Finnick's torment any less. She tried to break through the wall with her axe to get to him, to tell him it wasn't real and Annie was safe. But she couldn't, so she just paced back and forth while Peeta poured out an endless stream of comforting words that Katniss couldn't hear, and Beetee, still holding the knife, tried to understand the barrier that separated them. Maybe he thought he could bring it down, or maybe he was just curious. It was hard to say.

With her dizzy mind, the hour seemed like ten.

When the wall came down she pulled Finnick to his feet and held him tightly. He dug his nails into her back and then clenched and unclenched his fists over and over. He shook like an aspen. Beetee and Peeta were trying to convince everyone that the voices had been Capitol modifications, that nothing was really real. That this torture was not real. But it didn't matter, because Finnick was still useless right now, and would continue to be for quite some time. Those sons of bitches.

Her voice was dull with rage, "Of course Peeta's right. The whole country adores Katniss' little sister," she couldn't, wouldn't say Annie's name. "If they really killed her like this, they'd probably have an uprising on their hands. Don't want that, do they?"

Then something broke in her exhausted mind and she was saying it, saying the words that she had longed to say for months and months. She was shouting it into the sky, head thrown back, for all of Panem to hear.

"Whole country in rebellion? Wouldn't want anything like that!"

She dropped her head and looked at her allies. They were in absolute shock. Katniss' jaw was hanging wide enough to catch flies. Peeta looked like his eyes might fall out of his head. Beetee's mouth was a thin, flat line. Finnick, still shaking, had the ghost of a smile on his bloody face.

"I'm getting water."

Katniss reached out and grabbed her hand as she passed, saying in a hushed, terrified, "Don't go in there. The birds–"

Somehow, this small act of what could be perceived as protective kindness unnerved Johanna. Katniss was not a friend. She was a stupid little brat, and Johanna did not need her concerned looks.

"They can't hurt me," she said flatly. "I'm not like the rest of you. There's no one left I love." With a sharp shake, her hand was free and she stomped into the jungle.

The jabberjays were silent. They agreed with her.

Later, she still hadn't slept. They were sitting on the beach, eating shellfish and watching the anthem play. Just like a happy little dysfunctional family. Eight dead. Sixteen total. Johanna thought it wasn't too bad for two days in. At least the Gamemakers weren't dragging this out.

"They're really burning through us," she scoffed, and then tuned out the resulting conversation as she tried to keep her exhausted mind from whirling out of control. Every few minutes she had to fight to keep from breaking into hysterical laughter at nothing in particular. She put her hand on the sand to steady herself, ignoring the bread that fell from the sky. Finnick was going to have to handle counting it.

The rest of them talked and talked about dividing the twenty-four rolls, and it had to look suspicious, so she interrupted in a voice that sounded almost drunk, "Let's each have three, and whoever is still alive at breakfast can take a vote on the rest."

Katniss actually laughed at this, and Johanna looked over at her with surprise. Maybe this girl wasn't so awful after all. Or maybe it was just the overwhelming exhaustion talking. Probably the exhaustion.

Finally, finally, _finally, _they turned in for the night. She staggered onto the mat, and curled into a ball. Finnick lay beside her, his back flat against hers. There would be no tearful, or even jovial, cuddling this evening. The trauma of hearing Annie's pained voice was somehow different than his worry that she had no one to protect her. With them in the arena, maybe Annie was already deep in some Capitol prison. Probably not, but Johanna knew that Finnick could think of little else.

_His breath stinks in the morning anyway_, she mused, as she crashed headlong into a deep, dreamless sleep.

* * *

><p>The next morning, she woke and stayed up long enough to shove her face full of bread, and then she collapsed into sleep for another few hours. After not nearly long enough to make up for her days without rest, Finnick was waking her, whispering, "It's down to the wire," in her ear. And then Beetee was explaining his plan with the tree and the spool as though it were the simplest thing in the world. It made no sense to anyone else, that was obvious, but he explained so logically that they couldn't really do anything but approve. Johanna and Finnick knew that they needed to agree regardless. This was Beetee's hour, and they might as well let him have it. But it was hard to let go of that sort of control, and Finnick would not agree to the plan until Johanna did. His look asked her if she believed this was the move that would get them out of the arena. She was unsure why he believed that she knew more than he did, but in the end they all agreed to Beetee's plan.<p>

And then it was nothing but mindless tasks, and naps, and keeping watch and eating so much shrimp. She didn't even like seafood. She wanted a handful of chocolates before she was going to die. Or maybe a steak. Because, really, she didn't believe that a spool of wire and a fake lightning tree could get them out. She would try for Finnick, but she didn't believe it, not for real. She wasn't one of those people who believed in premonitions, or anything like that, but something deep and silent and pulsing told her that she wasn't going to get away so easily.

Peeta and Katniss were tense, probably fighting over who got to live and who got to die again. Neither, really, if this plan didn't work. If only one of them made it out, it would only be a half-life anyway. This Johanna knew from personal experience. She slept next to Finnick, hand in hand. She wasn't sure why they touched so much in their sleep anymore, but it helped them both, so she left it alone. The star-crossed lovers from District Twelve kept their terse watch on the beach.

The next morning, Beetee separated Katniss and Peeta. Johanna led Katniss into the woods, unwinding the wire as they went. And then the wire was cut, and Enobaria and Brutus were about to be on them any minute. Johanna did what she had to do, which also happened to be something she had fantasized about doing for over a year: she slammed her fist into Katniss' skull almost hard enough to kill her, but not quite. She dug out the tracker from the girls arm and ran, leading Enobaria and Brutus away, straight into Peeta and Chaff, who had finally managed to catch up with them. Maybe he had been hiding in the trees the whole time, keeping watch. Ignoring the absence of Blight, it was their happy group from the Training Center all over again.

Brutus knocked Peeta to the ground easily because the boy was distracted by trying to locate Katniss to defend himself properly. Chaff threw his body into the old Victor, and the two were locked in a terrible struggle, to which Johanna could pay little attention, because, once again, she was wrestling Enobaria. This time for her life.

"You're wearing clothes, today, you stupid girl," Enobaria hissed.

"So are you, you creepy bitch," Johanna responded, trying to get to her axes which had been scattered on the ground when the woman had attacked her from behind. The two rolled back and forth, Enobaria constantly trying to get her teeth close enough to Johanna's throat to rip it out. Johanna wiggled and squirmed but she could not free herself from the woman's strong arms.

"PEETA!" Katniss screamed from somewhere on the beach.

The boy cried out her name and struggled to his feet just in time to see Brutus skewer Chaff with his spear. With a frustrated howl of rage, Peeta picked up one of Johanna's axes and swung it with incredible force into Brutus' chest cavity. The man fell to the ground and died almost instantly. Without a second glance at the man he had brutally killed, Peeta dropped the axe and ran toward the sound of his lover's voice.

Johanna was going to be separated from her allies because she was too busy rolling around on the ground with Enobaria. What an absolutely annoying way to die. But she was having no luck freeing herself. The woman was too strong. She couldn't fight her way out. As though she were succumbing to the effects of exhaustion, she slowly let her body go slack. Enobaria, unlike her tribute Clove, didn't really talk to her meat before she ate it. But her small second of gloating as she reared back over Johanna's throat gave her the time she needed to butt her head into the woman's nose so hard she saw stars. Enobaria fell unconscious, and Johanna wiggled free. She left the woman lying on the beach, and sprinted after Peeta.

He was running as fast as he could, but Johanna was much faster, and she reached him just in time for them both to be flung backwards as the force field around the arena exploded. In the electrified chaos, they struggled to regain their footing and make it back to the lightning tree. But they were too shaky, and the dizzying sparks that flew through the air made it difficult to maintain their balance for more than a few seconds at a time.

A hovercraft descended in the same moment that both she and Peeta were struck by the discharge from an energy weapon that slammed them into the beach once more. They couldn't move, or even talk. This was it. This was the end. It was a bit sad about the rebellion. Without Peeta, Katniss was bound to be pretty useless. Hopefully Finnick would pick up the slack. Maybe he could work the populace into a frenzy by taking off his pants. He had to make it. He just had to. A different hovercraft rose into the air near where she thought the tree might be, and wheeled away, as if escaping. They made it.

Lying motionless on the sand, Johanna stared after it into the sky because she could do nothing else. Now that she was about to die, there was something she had to do. No reason to hold off anymore.

All the closed doors in her mind were flung open and their occupants roamed free.

His name was Marcus, and he had the most innocent boyish smile. He took so much pride in his work, and lived despite the enormous risk behind everything he did. He had sacrificed himself for something he believed in with all his heart. She saw his face, shining and happy, and then blushing. She saw how he looked at her, the adoration in his eyes.

His name was Blight and he was a ridiculously simple man, who liked to get drunk, and sleep with flirty town girls. He never could get himself together after his Games, but he had been a lot more content than most Victors, because he was too dull for the Capitol to ever pay him much mind. Everybody loved him, even though he told the worst jokes, and drank too much. He had loved Johanna like she was his exasperating baby sister.

His real name had been Alder. His skin was a warm coppery brown and his eyes were dark, so incredibly dark. They looked into the deepest parts of a person. No matter what they found, there was always quiet understanding in response. He had a deep voice, and knew songs in an ancient, beautiful language that had been near extinction far before the cataclysm that ripped apart the world so long ago. Even with his strong sculptor-lumberjack's hands, he had been too gentle for the world the Capitol had created. She was pretty certain she would have fallen in love with him if she had been given more of a chance.

Her name was Elsa. She was funny and brave and smart and worked so hard. Her fingers were thick and knobby from years of cutting down trees. She couldn't sing to save her life. She hated to be cold. She loved things that tasted sweet. She didn't need anyone, but she had loved her baby Johanna with her entire being. Every moment of life with her had been precious and special and full of laughter. If Johanna was going to die, at least she could die knowing that she had been important to and loved by the world's most beautiful person.

It was sort of unfortunate that the two of them were going to leave this world virgins, but other than that, it was alright for her to die, here on this beach with poor little Peeta Mellark. If Finnick and Katniss could live, it was alright. That's what both of them had intended on seeing through from the start, anyway.

But as her body was lifted into the hovercraft and carried away, she realized that the Capitol had other plans. And then she fell into oblivion and remembered nothing for a very long time._  
><em>


	17. Interlude

"Pa, why do we have to kill the babies?" eight-year-old Gale Hawthorne asked. "They already lost their mother – isn't that just extra hard?" Today was Sunday, the most magical day of the week, because, after years of begging, his father was showing him how to hunt for the first time. He had agreed only after he had sat his son down and had a long conversation about what was appropriate behavior for both inside the woods and out of it: the importance of keeping secrets. The moment they had crawled under the fence, the young boy had been in awe. Everything was clean and fresh and peaceful, so unlike the dirty streets and houses that filled the Seam, the somewhat cleaner, but still pretty grim shops in the Merchant section, and even his coal-dust covered school. The trees were enormous and shady and everything smelled so nice. His father had showed him different sorts of plants he could eat, and ones he definitely couldn't. He had shown him how to walk quietly, although Gale wasn't quite good at that yet. Now they were resetting a snare which had recently caught a rabbit. Nearby, a nest full of blind babies squeaked for their mother who would never return.

"Without someone to feed 'em, they'll just starve to death. Trust me, little man, that is not something that anyone wants," Jasper Hawthorne replied, a sad smirk in his otherwise stoic face. "Killing is a mercy in situations like this." He reached into the nest, and took out the babies, one by one. With strong hands, he sharply twisted their necks. He handed the last one to his son, who mimicked his actions with trembling fingers. Jasper nodded at him, pride evident in his grim features.

Afterwards, Gale fell thoughtful for a long time, until he finally asked the question that weighed on his mind, "What about kids? Does the Capitol do this to them when they lose both their parents? I know old people starve sometimes." He remembered when the old man who used to wander the Seam had fallen down and broken his leg. He couldn't work, but without a family, no one had helped him. They just found him one day, lying in the street, all skinny and sick-looking. And dead.

"Nah Gale, they don't. They're not kind like you or me. If babies are starving, they'll just let em. Or they take em and put em in a home, which is even worse."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I, son. You gotta promise me something, though."

Gale nodded, eager to please.

"I've got a dangerous job. If anything ever happens, your mother has too many mouths to feed by herself. If you learn to hunt out here, you're gonna have to help her. I'm trusting you to keep my babies safe, little man."

The lanky boy scoffed. This was unthinkably ridiculous, "Nothing's going to happen to you, Pa. Look at how smart you are!"

"Smart don't mean too much in a coal mine, Gale. Don't mean much of anything in Twelve, really."

His son sat for a few moments, thoughtful again.

"But what if you could invent something that would help everybody. Wouldn't the Capitol want that? Wouldn't they want to keep you around because you're smart?"

"Not if it came from us. Being smart threatens em. Even if we invented something, you and me, that made all the power in the world and more and meant we didn't ever need any more fuel at all, they'd still make us dig coal out here."

"But why?"

"Cause when they have us doing this, they can keep us down. And there's nothing we can do about it. The Capitol picks out smart people, and they ruin them. Took the smartest man I ever knew and turned him into a pathetic drunk. So Gale, if you want to change things, you get smart. You stay smart. But lay low. Wait for them to get comfortable. And then," he tripped the snare he had been setting and it snapped closed.

"Then they're caught."

Four years later, these words echoed through Gale's head the day the sirens reverberated through the streets, announcing the mining accident that took his father away, just as Jasper had predicted.

They echoed as he stood with that knobby-kneed Everdeen girl in front of the Justice Building when they were presented with awards celebrating their fathers' valor. Awards that were meant to gag any sort of outrage at the manner of their deaths.

They echoed as he delivered his baby sister with the help of a nervous neighbor. The only healer they could afford had been Mr. Everdeen's wife, and she was too catatonic now to be of use to anyone.

They echoed as he saw his neighbor's sweet, lovely widow creep to Cray's back door to feed her starving family. He watched as the months living this way drained her kindness away and left desolation behind.

They echoed as he again, and again, and again signed up for more tesserae than any child had in years. As he had to be a father to two boys before he even was a man himself. As he had to watch his baby sister grow up scrawny and weak without enough food to get chubby or enough heat to stay warm in the winter. As he watched his beautiful mother turn into a worn-out shadow.

With each echo, a fire began to slowly, steadily ignite within soul. But it was a slow burn. And he was patient, a feral half-man, half- boy who set snares and waited for them to spring. He had promised his father to keep his family safe. But he didn't know if he could do it for ever, with the fire that was slowly consuming his spirit. For the time being, though, he listened to his father's advice.

He got smart.

He stayed smart.

And he lay low.

Unfortunately, he ended up on national television anyway.


	18. Dusted

**Par****t Three: Thirteen**_  
><em>

_With the exception of bringing back his father, Gale had never wanted anything as badly as he wanted the girl from Seven to win the Hunger Games._

_At fifteen, he had never paid a lot of attention to any of the tributes. The ones from Twelve were always killed pretty quickly, and after that happened he just got angry at whoever was rich enough to survive. Even at the age of nine, he had found Finnick Odair especially disgusting, with his flashy good looks and that self-important smile. The rest were never much better. Hunger Games victors were almost always Capitol pets; if not, they were just kids who managed to somehow get lucky. After his father's death, he was completely disinterested in the results of the Games. They made him furious, and a furious, emotional Gale was a terrible hunter. There were kids to be fed and serious responsibilities riding on his shoulders. The required viewing times cut into the already limited hours when he could hunt, and he loathed every minute spent in front of the broadcast watching insane Ones and Twos and Fours kill each other. _

_But this girl, she was something completely different. _

_After countless hours spent in the woods laying snares and trying to understand how his quarry behaved, Gale knew just a little bit about traps. He knew the art of misdirection, how to play to the fears of simpleminded prey. The skills taught to him by his father had been constantly honed against the threat of starvation, and now they were sharp as flint. He tried to teach them to the scrawny little Everdeen girl with the sharp eye who'd traded him knowledge for a bow. She was pretty eager to learn, and really, she caught on quick, but she didn't have the same instinct he did. There were some things you just knew without being taught._

_He was pretty certain he knew nothing when he compared himself to that girl from Seven, though._

_At first the camera had ignored her, but he realized pretty quickly on that she wasn't the bawling little coward that they had all seen on the television. The Careers this year were brutal, and Seven was still alive, even though she hadn't picked up anything at the Cornucopia, or gotten any parachutes, as far as he could see. So he wasn't surprised when, in the terrible quiet after Gertie Larkspur's insides were all pulled out, down slithered Seven from the trees. Gale didn't blame her for letting his neighbor die. There was nothing she could have done alone and unarmed against a pack of four Careers. But resourceful little Gertie had seen her, and hid a pair of axes from the eyes of her murderers the same way she had always cheekily stolen pointless trinkets from the local Peacekeepers. When Seven reached down to take them, Gertie, with the Seam sensibility that Gale knew damn well, proposed a trade with her dying breath._

_Seven had picked up the axes and buried one in a tree with a flick of her wrist, with practiced ease, as though she had been doing it her entire life. Gone was the mousy little coward, and in her place, a brash voice had accepted the trade, and even upped her side of the bargain._

_After that, Seven crept through the rainy old forest, which Gale figured had to be almost exactly the same as the kind they had in her district, because it wasn't anything at all like Twelve. Death was her comrade in arms. She killed efficiently and with finesse, finding her prey while they were at their most vulnerable, all the while weaving a net of deceit and fear around her most dangerous quarry: the crazy girl from One. Seven's whole existence was one living, breathing trap. It was breathtaking, magnificent. He couldn't stop watching, not even for a moment._

_When she dropped out of the trees, she was only wearing a bra, having used her shirt long ago as some sort of waterskin. The rain soaked through the tiny white garment quickly, and Gale found himself seeing a young woman's breasts for the first time. They was very unlike those of the weary mothers who nursed their infants in the Hob. He was fixated on her flattened pink nipples, the size of the old silver coins that Peacekeepers sometimes traded for game. They bounced lightly as she moved, and it was fascinating._

_When she threw the axe at the rotten Capitol bitch, and then started chopping her to pieces, his mother took his baby sister and little brothers out of the room. _

_Gale was relieved, because he had never been so turned on before, and it was a little unnerving. _

_For weeks after the Seventy-first Games, Gale would wake up extra early, going to the woods well before the Everdeen girl would show. He'd lean against the bole of a secluded alder and think about the girl from Seven, what she looked like when she jumped out of the trees, how she had lorded over the audience in that green dress covered with blood, the way she had tricked everyone, the way she had fought the Capitol's idea of what the Games should be and __**won**__. He'd take himself in his hands and think about these things, and her breasts, and he'd wonder what she __**felt**__ like until his knees were weak and he had to hold on to the tree as he shuddered his release onto the ground. It wasn't like he hadn't done it before, but there certainly had never been this kind of specificity to the act._

_In his young life, Gale Hawthorne had never wanted anything so badly as he wanted that terrifying girl from Seven. _

_But other girls showed up soon enough. He was as handsome as his mother had been beautiful once upon a time, and the women in Twelve had been noticing him before he really even noticed them. Who was he to keep some pretty merchant girl from slumming it, if she really wanted to meet him by the slag heap? He made sure he was careful, but no one ever left disappointed. In fact, considering his sudden surge in popularity, he was pretty certain they started telling their friends. He didn't limit himself to eager town girls – the jaded beauties from the Seam gave as good as they got. For two years, he managed to distract himself pretty regularly from the overwhelming powerlessness he felt when he thought about four hungry mouths that needed feeding, six small feet that never stopped outgrowing shoes, and the infections his mother kept getting in her chapped, worn hands. Sometimes, particularly enthusiastic girls with strong thighs and throaty moans even managed to chase away his quiet fury at the Capitol for taking his father away and putting him in such a terrible position._

_Then the Everdeen girl, Catnip, she grew up. She grew into a deadly shot with a clear, hard stare and a lithe body tight as her bowstring. She made him laugh, and she understood him like no one else. He could talk freely around her, easy as breathing, and that liberty was beguiling. Slowly, over four years of careful give and take, their partnership in the woods evolved, until one day he realized it had grown into something beyond. It turned into an idea – one of escape, of independence. Together, the two of them, they could defy the Capitol and just leave. They could be __**free**__ from the crushing weight of the damn Games and the mines and everything else. All they needed was each other. This idea intoxicated him almost as much as the girl herself did. He stopped going to the slag heap altogether. He fell in love, but he landed on his feet. He had no idea how to tell a girl about this sort of feelings, especially this specific girl. He was good at waiting, so that's what he did._

_But when he closed his eyes and wrapped his fingers around his cock in the early mornings - much earlier than Katniss would ever be awake - before he thought of her strong hands and shining dark braid, the first thing that came to mind, as it always had, were flattened pink nipples, four bloody stripes, and dark, merciless eyes. His thoughts never stayed there; nonetheless it was always where they started. But a fantasy was a fantasy, and his Catnip was all the reality that he ever thought he would need._

_And then, at eighteen, when he was on the verge of escaping the Hunger Games forever, Prim Everdeen was reaped. Katniss volunteered, which seemed like the most devastating thing that could possibly happen. _

_Until, against all odds, she won, bringing that stupid baker home with her._

* * *

><p>It was pretty obvious that no one hated the coal mines more than Thom Alberts. The other men, well, just like Gale, they weren't exactly thrilled to be in the oppressive, deep darkness, but they tried to distract themselves with twice-told stories, bad jokes, and, of course, tales of their own lewd exploits. Gale was pretty certain that the latter were physical impossibilities half the time, but he would at least crack a smile at the more creative descriptions. Thom, though, never smiled from the moment they entered the elevator, until they saw the sky again at the end of the day. Gale knew what it was, everyone else in the Seam did too, what happened when a miner needs to be out of the ground and under the sky so bad that he can't function; his eyes empty out and his cheeks turn hollow. Thom was dusted. Men like him didn't last very long in the mines. They walked into the electric fence, or ended up eating nightlock off the bushes just beyond the Meadow. Sometimes, they found old guns and blew their brains out behind the Hob, or at least they had when it had still been standing. Sometimes, they just stopped eating and fell over dead from exhaustion after a few weeks.<p>

Basically, it seemed clear that Thom was not long for this world.

But that was what the Capitol did; took your friends and family away and left people you didn't even know in their place. You'd think he'd be used to it by now.

At least when he was in the mines these days it kept him from seeing Katniss rolling around on some exotic beach with Mellark's desperate hands all over her. It kept him from the Capitol cameras that followed him everywhere trying to get an interview, and best (and worst) of all, it kept him from seeing her getting killed. In the mines he could swing his pick and pretend that he was piercing a hole in the brain of Romulus Thread. If he hadn't been stuck underground, he'd have been stuck in front of a broadcast somewhere, watching Finnick Odair himself make Katniss laugh. It was unsettling, watching her ally herself with the Victors he had, for the most part, loathed all his life. But what was even more bizarre had been watching _the_ girl from Seven, star of his young imagination in what seemed like an entire lifetime ago, slap the girl he now loved in the face.

He had laughed, because, frankly, Catnip should have seen that one coming, and also, he had never really imagined those two worlds colliding outside of some kind of feverish dream. But that had been the first and last time he had laughed since the Peacekeepers had drug them all off to the Quell.

When he wasn't in the mines or being forced to watch television, on those very rare occasions, he would sit with Thom on the edge of the Meadow, where they would listen to the hum of the fence and occasionally split an old can of beer that they'd managed to get in trade. But even that was coming to an end. There was no hunting anymore since that son of a bitch Thread had flayed most of the skin off his back and burnt down the Hob. Nothing to trade with and no real place to do it even if you had. At least they had caught Gale first, and not Thom, who had spent a pretty decent amount of time in the woods himself, trying to dig up plants to grow outside his house. Gale was pretty certain that his friend, already drawn and pale from the stress of the mines, would not have survived a whipping. Thom just didn't have the same hoard of hatred and spite to keep him alive.

Some evenings Rory would come by with Prim, of all people. Gale had no idea why this was until his mother explained that his brother had asked Mrs. Everdeen if he might take her youngest daughter out "walkin'," and the girl's mother had insisted he do it under supervision. Apparently Rory assumed that two exhausted nineteen-year-olds staring at a fence were effective chaperones. The two kids would shyly talk as they wandered around the edge of the Meadow, until one of them would stumble into the other, and then there would be silent, embarrassed blushing. This was one of the few times that Thom would even smile.

"Rory'd better keep her away from the bakery," he'd say in his slow way, gently provoking.

Gale would sneer bitterly and shake his head, because really, what else was he supposed to do? It was probably good advice, despite being a joke. But Rory never seemed to get very far and Prim always left looking sad and worried, no doubt for her sister. His brother, who had always been quiet, but lately was silent almost all of the time, never said much about what went on.

They weren't hungry, at least. When it came to Abernathy's attention that Rory had signed up for tesserae, Haymitch had overpaid his mother about a thousand times what her housecleaning had been worth, so even with her unable to find work and no game to be had, they were doing alright now, he guessed. Posy had new shoes and somehow they had even managed to get Vick glasses. After twelve years of watching his baby brother squinting, it galled Gale that he hadn't been the one who was able to give him his eyes back. But unlike the embarrassingly large amount of pity money that Mellark had offered him the night before the Reaping, at least he knew that Haymitch wasn't being charitable. The drunk knew that what he had done in the Capitol to make his tributes win had somehow ended in Gale's whipping and the resulting shunning of his mother, among a host of other miserable things for the district. Like a good Seam boy, Abernathy did his best to make amends. That was okay. Everyone was even. Vick could see to read the five rotting books in the school that he liked so much, and Posy could get medicine to make the still itching scars from her measles fade away.

When it was pitch dark, Gale and Thom would head home, never saying much of anything. But Gale knew that as they went their separate ways, his friend was looking at him with pity. The same pity that was in Gale's own eyes every morning as they lined up to go into the mines and Thom tried to hide the tremors in his fingers.

Every man's got his own piece of hell, he guessed.

His was trudging into his house and settling on the floor to watch the required recap of the Third Quarter Quell. He was lucky enough that the Capitol had given them a television to watch it on. Katniss Everdeen's cousins should have their privacy, after all.

Afterwards, he would wander the streets. He always ended up in the same place but he never set out to go there. As he wandered, he thought about all the different ways he could disarm the nearest Peacekeeper, and how he would probably end up dead if he tried. He was sick of waiting, of laying low. It was time for action, but he was damned to inactivity. He was just as dusted as Thom was.

This night, was no different than the rest. The gravel of the street crunched under his boots as he walked toward his house. Inside, he could hear Vick yelling urgently for their mother, and then Rory, who never shouted, joined in. Gale broke into a run and skidded into the room just in time to see his Catnip, bloody and dizzy on her feet, shoot a golden-tailed arrow straight into empty air. There was a flash of lightning, and suddenly everything on the screen began to explode. And then blackness. The electricity to the television was cut. The small light that hung over their living room had gone out as well.

Something was very, very wrong.

"Get out of the house now," he told his family. Rory picked up Posy and put her on his shoulders. Their mother grabbed a shawl and wrapped it around her tightly, then took Vick's hand. Seeing that they were leaving, Gale grabbed his headlamp and ran outside.

He could hear the inhabitants of Twelve, unnerved by the loss of power and what they had just seen in the Games. Anything that had run on any electricity was quiet, and the resulting silence made every little noise sound deafening. The crickets were so, so loud. Across the street he saw Thom, looking confused in the darkness but smart enough to have put on his headlamp as well. Some others in the street had done the same, and in the dim light, Gale saw the panic in the faces of his people. The Peacekeepers who had been on almost every street corner were all just _gone_. There was no one to protect them.

Then, the woods themselves fell silent.

They were coming.

"Get everyone to the Meadow!" Gale shouted. His blood was thrumming in his veins like hot acid. Something terrible was about to happen. They hadn't even rebelled, but it didn't matter. Twelve was too volatile, every inhabitant soaked in all that coal dust. The Capitol was going to make sure they never even had a chance to fight. Just like Thirteen. He grabbed Thom's arm, "Bring down the fence. It's hardly ever electrified, you know that. Even if it is, if you get some wood, you should be able to make a barrier so you can push it down. Do you know the lake?"

He did.

"Take them there."

Thom nodded sternly. He didn't look quite so dusted anymore. And then he was off running in the night, calling for everyone to follow

"Ma, go with them," he called back to Hazelle. His mother turned without even a goodbye, and the boys followed her. He didn't have to tell them he loved them. They already knew. His actions had been screaming the words every day for the past six years.

"Rory, wait!" his younger brother spun around, and handed Posy to Vick in an almost seamless motion.

"We've got to get the Everdeens, and someone has to warn the people in town." His brother nodded, and they ran into the night.

They were sprinting up the hill towards Victor's Village when the first bomb fell behind them, blowing the bakery into oblivion.


	19. Bad

_Madge Undersee always whispered his name. It made him feel guilty, because it implied a depth of feeling that he had not expected from a spoiled rich girl. The other town girls had never been so... well, he just shouldn't have assumed anything about her. Katniss picked her companions carefully and Madge was, after all, her only friend, other than him… and maybe Mellark. The thought of the baker boy filled him with rage, and he pushed it away, pressing himself against the writhing, beautiful blonde girl who was trembling in the blissful aftershock still gasping "Gale… Gale… Gale…" over and over. He punctuated each of her quiet cries with a thrust, and then rolled onto his back, pulling her with him. After a lifetime of easy-living, Madge had very little stamina, but she was always willing to do whatever he wanted. Her pale skin would be red from exertion, her blonde hair a snarled mess as she clumsily rocked on top of him, trying to hold herself together. She always did, and when he came, he never said anything at all._

_Afterwards, she would wrap herself in a silky robe and quietly bring him his clothes. She knew what this was, despite what her whispered cries might indicate. _

_It had started the day of the interview, of the loathsome proposal, when he had wandered the cold streets for hours in shock. When he had passed the Mayor's house, she had opened the door and __wordlessly __invited him in. He couldn't really explain what at that moment had made him accept the offer. Once inside, she had taken his feet out of his boots and gently rubbed them until he could feel his toes again, the entire time gazing at him with those dark blue eyes. When he was warm again, she had led him silently to her bedroom, though once they got there, she hadn't really known how to proceed. She learned quick enough as time went on. Both of her parents were sedated with morphling every night – her mother for her headaches, and her father well, for the pain of life, he guessed – so they never woke, no matter how much noise they made. And quiet Madge who had so loved his strawberries was pliant under his hands with a new kind of desperation that made him forget everything._

_He knew why. This wasn't her trying to make her daddy __angry __or boyfriend jealous by fooling around with a rough Seam boy. She wasn't looking for a bit of wild excitement before she had to settle down with the grocer's son so as to guarantee herself a comfortable future. Madge had enough money to choose whoever she wanted, and for some reason, she wanted him. He had always just ignored her tender looks over the years, especially the sorrow-tinged ones once Katniss went away, the ones that had made his blood boil with rage. The thought that he was now a man to be pitied in the district was a humiliation difficult to bear. Now he knew what they were doing was hurting the Mayor's daughter, but he hurt too much himself to pay it much thought. Her pain was also pretty irrelevant, because anyone in the town who knew much of anything would have agreed that she was betraying her closest friend just by being with him. They both were. But what did it matter? Everyone was betraying everyone else these days._

_Because Catnip was to be married, and not just married, but __**Capitol**__-married to that soppy, sensitive Merchant boy whose first glimpse of hunger had probably been the Hunger Games themselves. He was just so __**wrong**__ for her, and Gale had always thought that he himself was __**right**__ that the burning injustice threatened to overwhelm him. But there was nothing he could do. Nothing at all, but fuck Madge Undersee in the moments when he wasn't impotently sitting by and watching his hopes and dreams get smashed to pieces by a stupid kid who didn't know nightlock from blueberries. A kid who didn't know what Prim's favorite color was, or how to get Mrs. Everdeen to smile. Who didn't know what drowsy Katniss looked like when she woke up from a summer's nap under the trees. Who hadn't spent nearly every free hour in the past four years getting to know and love her. He'd just threw her bread once. Not even given it to her. Just thrown it at her like you would a dog. _

_So Gale guessed if Katniss was happy with Mellark's scraps, then Madge could damn well be alright with his. It was better than nothing. Actually, it was a far sight better than it had ever been with anyone else._

_But when the happy couple returned, Katniss asked him to run away with her, to escape her wedding, which was actually fake, and the crushing control of President Snow. His heart nearly exploded with joy, until she added, not even conscious enough of his feelings to realize that it would hurt, that she planned on bringing a host of other people with them, her fake fiancé among them. He would have gone anyway, even if he had to work to feed Mellark every day for the rest of his life, but then she let slip that there was a rebellion in District Eight. The slow-burning flame in his heart roared into a roiling inferno at the mere thought. So he said no, with the realization that the one thing he wanted more than Catnip in his arms was the chance, however small, to bring the Capitol down. He owed himself and everyone he knew that much. It made Katniss very, very angry. _

_He stopped seeing Madge without explanation. The girl understood, though he couldn't ignore the soft, unobtrusive sadness in her eyes the rare times that their paths crossed. But it didn't matter. The girl he loved was back and she was marrying the baker to keep them all alive. He had almost wrapped his fingers around the fleeting opportunity to stop it all, but he had just let it flutter away for some kind of damn noble idea of freedom. It was all just so disgustingly tragic that he could hardly be certain who to be angry at half the time, so he was just furious with everyone, biding his time for the a chance to take their lives back from the Capitol. A chance that might never come. _

_It seemed like things couldn't have gotten much worse, until he showed up at old Cray's back door only to find an enormous black hearted man in the lecher's place. A man who had been grimly delighted to tie him to a post and rip his back to pieces. Gale had tried to be strong, to keep his rage-filled eyes trained on the man as he flayed him, but the pain was stronger and eventually he blacked out only to wake in agony hours later in the Everdeen's kitchen. He remembered, in a morphling-induced haze that Katniss had promised to stay with him. That she had kissed him. But she had kissed Mellark too, when she thought he was going to die, and made the same sort of desperate promises to remain by his side. He had seen them all on television._

_It took him nearly a month to be able to walk upright after everything was said and done. By the time he could really move his body the way he was meant to, the Capitol announced that, once again, they were going to take Catnip away and make her fight to the death - only this time against skilled killers instead of randomly selected children. _

_At this point, he decided never again to speculate about whether or not things could get worse._

_He hadn't been willing to run, and now she was going to be swept away once more, not into the arms of another man, but into the arms of death. The look he saw in her eyes told him that she did not plan to come back from the arena this time. The bitter pain nearly consumed him. He wondered what Mellark could have possibly done to convince her to sacrifice her life, but he knew that, based on the personalities of the two of them, the kid probably hadn't done a thing. Gale urged his rage towards him, but the baker boy made it difficult to stick. Every day, Mellark pushed Katniss and Haymitch to train, insisting that they be prepared in every possible way for the arena. He kept his distance from Katniss; any time that he was not drilling with them the boy spent alone. He was no longer the dewy-eyed, heartsick kid who had stepped off the train. He was a hard taskmaster who was sacrificing what little time he had left on this earth to make certain Catnip stayed on it. The change was hard not to appreciate, especially for Gale, who would have given almost anything to keep her alive. _

_One night, as Gale prepared to go to bed before another back-breaking day in the mines, there was a knock at his door._

_It was him. _

"_What are you doing here?" he asked accusingly._

_The blonde boy held up a camera, "I need your picture." _

"_What in the hell for?"_

_He swallowed and for a moment the gentle kid for whom Gale carried nothing but disdain was back. Then he said quietly, but with self-assurance, "I need to give her a convincing reason to stay alive. It'd probably work best if you smile."_

_Days later, Gale confessed to Katniss that everything would be much simpler if Peeta were easier to hate. For a man who hated things pretty easy, that was saying a lot._

* * *

><p>Gale and his brother burst through the door of the Everdeen's house to find Prim and her mother filling satchels with every medicine and herb they could find by candlelight. Mrs. Everdeen was sharply barking orders and her young daughter filled them with a grim efficiency. He had expected to come upon the two of them in a frightened state of shock after what had happened to Katniss in the arena, but the explosion in the bakery must have stirred them into action.<p>

"You've got to get out now," Gale grabbed Mrs. Everdeen and began dragging her toward the door.

The woman dug in her heels and pulled back, looking up at Gale with the stubborn fire he recognized in her daughter, "The Mellarks and others in the town, they are bound to be gravely injured. Someone needs to care for the wounded." Rory was wordlessly at Prim's side, trying to help the girl gather supplies as Gale and her mother argued.

"Anyone who was in that bakery is dead," Gale said grimly. "And you will be too if you go into town. I'll get as many out as I can, but we need you alive and somewhere safe to heal the injured from the entire district." He didn't add that Katniss, if she were somehow not dead, would never forgive him if he didn't protect her family. The point didn't matter much, because he would have come for the Everdeens anyway. They felt like family too, after all of these years.

Mrs. Everdeen was, to her credit, unlike her daughter enough to see when she was beaten, "I will set up a triage station. Bring everyone to me as quickly as you can." With that, she turned and ignored him, focusing on the task at hand, "Rory, I need you to go into Haymitch's basement and get as much of his white liquor as you can carry. Peeta threw most of it out, but there's a stockpile in the far right corner. Prim, go upstairs and fill this bag with the tinctures in my room. I'm going to pull out as many herbs from the garden as I can. Meet me there as soon as you are finished and we will go."

Gale grabbed his brother's arm as he ran past, and looked fiercely into his eyes, "Make sure you get them to the lake."

Rory nodded, and Gale released him to sprint out the door.

The hill descending to town from Victor's Village was covered with loose rocks and gravel, and a lesser man would have fallen over his feet if he even attempted taking it at a slow jog. Gale, with years of running through the woods under his belt, was not a lesser man. He ran as fast as he possibly could, skimming effortlessly across the uneven terrain, sharp eyes taking in the emerging hellscape before him. Blue and orange tongues of flame licked up the back wall of the bakery, the only one that remained standing. The fiery shrapnel from the blast had buried itself in the nearby shops, and they were beginning to ignite as well. All around him, bombs were falling, though none with the same dedicated precision as the first. The closer he came to the epicenter, the more certain he was that none of the Mellark family could have possibly survived. The air was full of screams that came from every direction. The smoldering fumes were choking his lungs, and made it almost impossible to see. His nostrils were burning with the acrid smoke, and underneath it, a smell that would haunt him forever.

The smell of burning flesh.

Refugees from the town began to run in his direction, and he tried to find someone he recognized, someone who could help him direct them to safety. Directly in front of him, carrying an unconscious boy, was the shoemaker's daughter, her pudgy, dirty face streaked with tears, but her mouth set and her eyes clear. She would have to do.

Still running, he shouted as passed her, "The Meadow! Get them all to the Meadow; it's the only place that won't burn!"

The blonde girl nodded, recognition dawning in her eyes, and as he ran he could hear her shouting, leading the townspeople towards the Seam. Gale vaguely noted that her parents were not with her, that they had to be dead. From the little he knew of the girl, the way she had been happy-go-lucky and kind to every customer the day he had bought Posy shoes, he had not expected her to keep her head in a situation like this.

The mayor's house was just ahead, and remained untouched. The door was open, and he could see Madge and a servant struggling to carry the unconscious Mrs. Undersee down the stairs. The Mayor himself was leaning against the doorframe in a state of confusion and shock. The morphling he took every evening made him useless to his family in the single moment they needed him most. Gale pushed himself to run faster than he had ever run before. There was time to save them.

When the bomb hit the large house, the explosion detonated in the top floor and blossomed in all directions like a deadly flower. Gale skidded to his feet just in time to watch a petal of fire descend the stairs, and envelope the mayor's family, a look of dark determination carved forever in Madge's lovely face.

He whispered her name.

Then the wake of the explosion slammed into him, knocking him onto his side and dislocating his shoulder. Instinctively, he curled into a ball just before the wall of fire shot over him. It grazed the tender skin on his exposed cheek, and he found himself roaring in agony that had as much to do with what he had just seen, as it had to do with the searing burn and the throbbing in his shoulder.

At least the fire was not Thread. It got no pleasure out of hearing his pain.

The flames retreated back toward the building as quickly as they had come, but the bombs were falling more and more rapidly now. He lifted himself unsteadily on his feet, his arm useless at his side. The house had completely collapsed - there was no way anyone could have survived. The explosion had left the street around him empty, save for the dead. He had somehow stayed alive, probably by being so close to the house as to fall under the wall of fire instead of standing in front of it. The flames rose higher and higher into the sky, the outline of the Justice Building stark against the dully glowing orange and red. He couldn't remain here for much longer.

As he stumbled toward the Seam, survivors flocked to him. Some were wailing or weeping, others had been shocked into complete silence. Old, young, Seam, Merchant, men, women, children. The only thing they had in common was they were all people who had done nothing wrong, other than inhabit the district where Katniss Everdeen had lived. The sheer scope and ruthlessness of the act was so staggering that Gale could only imagine what the Capitol would do to Katniss herself.

He found himself hoping that she had died quickly in the explosion.

When he brought the refugees to the fence, Thom was there waiting for Rory; they were alternately leading groups of survivors to the lake while the other kept watch to make certain that no one was left behind. Gale returned to the flaming city four more times, each time his approach was made shorter and shorter by the blaze, the group of survivors he brought back smaller and smaller. The fourth time, he only made it halfway through the Seam, and found no one but a small, weeping Merchant girl around Posy's age, who had somehow managed to escape the holocaust. With his good arm, he swept her up and then ran as fast as he could back to the fence, bits of the homes of his friends and neighbors collapsing all around him. Only Thom remained, his headlamp the sole light visible in front of the deep darkness of the woods.

Gale handed him the girl and then collapsed to his knees, retching and gasping for air. He closed his eyes tightly to keep the tears of rage from trickling down his face.

"It's bad," Thom said.

"Yeah," Gale vomited the contents of his stomach onto the grass, and then took several deep breaths to try to compose himself.

"It's bad."


	20. Rain

Johanna was awakened by the unbearable sound of every muscle in her body screaming. Muscles she didn't even realize she had, like the part of her chest that moved when she laughed, and the ones in her forehead that she used to crinkle her eyebrows, were loudly begging for some sort of relief from the anguish. With the pain rousing her, she tried to get her bearings, but it was difficult to think of anything other than the exquisitely sharp agony.

What was obvious was that she was lying face down on a cold concrete floor and she wasn't restrained in any way. When she tried to move, she found that she could, although it somehow managed to make her muscles ache even further. Whether this was an after-effect of what they'd shot her with, or from some other procedure that had taken place while she was unconscious, she wasn't certain. Either way, this pain was unlike anything she had ever experienced, and managed to immobilize her pretty well.

With shaking arms, she rolled herself over, gasping back sobs when the back of her head was finally resting on the ground. She was in a small cell, about eight feet square, with nothing but a drain on the floor right next to her ear, and small plastic bucket in the corner to keep her company.

Plastic, so she couldn't use it to kill herself.

This was really bad.

There was a door with a window, but it looked to be strangely elevated and half missing, as though the entire cell had been sunk about five feet into the ground. That was precisely what it was designed to do, making it impossible for anyone within the cell to escape. It didn't look like there were any microphones or cameras within the space – probably because someone could technically use them to kill herself.

Because, really, death was the only escape she was going to hope for at this point.

She rolled her head onto its side, and even this small action caused fairly extreme discomfort, though slightly less than it might have a few minutes earlier. It appeared that whatever pain she was experiencing was only temporary or, at least, not constant. She was just getting around to wondering about Finnick, when hisses and groans began to emanate from the drainpipe.

It was Peeta.

He had to be in the cell next to her. He sounded about as uncomfortable as she had been a few minutes ago, only on top of that, he was making desperate sounds, as though he were trying to stand up, but couldn't force his body to do so.

"It goes away, but you gotta hold still," she said loudly. At this point, she didn't care who heard her.

His noises of pain quieted, and then he responded in a strained voice, "Where's Katniss? What happened?"

Of course that's what he was going to want to know about first – the one thing she probably wasn't able to talk about. At this point, though, it was fair to say that the Capitol realized that Thirteen had sprung everyone else out of the arena. It wasn't like there were any other districts with hovercrafts.

"She's in Thirteen. With the rebels."

This must have shocked Peeta into motion, because all she could hear from the drain was a yell of agony.

"Settle down, Breadboy. That's all I know."

Whatever else he was, Peeta was not stupid enough to keep asking when they were obviously in a Capitol prison. "Is she… okay there?"

"Damned if I know. I've never been there. But she's probably better off than being here, so maybe you might want to worry about our current situation for a hot second.

For a beat there was quiet, and then Peeta muttered, "They took my leg."

That was just cruel. "Probably worried you were gonna kill yourself with it," Johanna said matter-of-factly.

This didn't make sense to Peeta. Not at first anyway. "Why would I…?" he trailed off.

Well, at least she wasn't stuck in jail with an idiot as her only companion. "Yeah, the fun's just beginning for you and me, Mellark. We're about to enjoy the very best the Capitol has to offer."

"I was ready to die in the arena," he said softly.

"Well… you're gonna wish you had."

Any response Peeta might have been preparing was interrupted by a strange grinding noise. Suddenly, the floor was rising upward, and the door lengthening.

"Time to meet the warden," she whispered.

* * *

><p>"So, I can't help but get the feeling that we've been here before," Johanna announced to her disinterested audience.<p>

She was handcuffed to a chair in a white room. It was pretty familiar at this point, having visited it for lengthy periods several times in the past… day? Two? She wasn't certain. It was probably three times as big as her cell, and was equipped with cameras, as well as a table full of wicked-looking tools, ostensibly for torture. But Johanna was pretty certain if the Capitol wanted to torture her they had technologies that would far surpass a pair of rusty, blood-stained pliers. They were just for show. The first attempt at psychological torture. It wasn't going to work on her.

Three other people were currently inhabiting the room – a uniformed Peacekeeper at the door, a thin, bland, white-coated man, and a menacing woman in tight, black clothing. A few hours ago, it had just been a higher-ranking Peacekeeper, who had drilled her about the rebellion fruitlessly for what felt like an eternity. Most of what he asked she hadn't known anyway, like what sort of defensive capabilities Thirteen had, what Katniss' role was, how things had been orchestrated on a grand scale. All she really knew were the details to a plan that had taken place already.

Even if she had known more, she'd be damned if she told the bastards anything. Didn't they get that by this point?

"So, I've seen enough of your stupid Capitol television shows to know what happens here," she tried again. "You," she tipped her head toward the woman in black, "are going to slither over here and ask me what I know. Of course, I'm gonna say nothing, like I have been for hours. Then you're going to get all slinky and evil, and tell me that it's in my best interests to tell you, while you," she gestured towards the man in the white coat, "are gonna start to fiddle around with those creepy-looking instruments on the table, and generally act like I'm beneath your interest, in an attempt to prove to me how cold and ruthless and good at torturing me you're going to be."

The two individuals in question said nothing.

"Course, then you, with the dominatrix fashion sense, are gonna ask me one more time if I'll talk. I'm gonna say no. Then, you're gonna tell me that there are quite a lot of ways for him to hurt me."

"There are," the woman finally answered. The man said nothing.

"Okay, well, in this hypothetical situation, there's one thing I have to say to that, and you might as well just consider that your answer now too."

The woman crossed her arms slowly, not even attempting to hide the pleasure that was blossoming on her face. With the same disinterested look, the man picked up a very thin, bendable knife and began to manipulate it with practiced ease.

Johanna's lips curled with disdain.

"Show me what you got, little man."

* * *

><p>"Seventeen different cuts, all on my ribs. Took a couple hours. He went <em>real <em>slow," Johanna lazily responded, pressing said cuts against the cool concrete floor in an attempt to soothe them. "How about you?"

"They fitted me for a suit and did one of those full body polishes."

Johanna didn't respond for a moment. "That's it?" She could hear the scraping of wood against the floor, "Wait, you have a _chair_?"

"Chair. Table. Cot. They even gave me a deck of cards. Still won't give me my leg, though."

"I think I bled out a pint of blood today, and they're making you look pretty and letting you play _solitaire_?"

Peeta continued awkwardly, "Yeah well, after all the beautification, I had an interview with Caeser Flickerman."

"You did _what_?" Johanna's voice dropped an octave.

"I did what I had to do to keep her safe," Peeta said firmly.

"You really think Snow is gonna stick to any promise he made?" she hissed. What in the hell did this kid think he was doing?

"No. But what choice do I have?" he asked bitterly. "And what I said, it wasn't a lie. All this fighting is going to bring us to extinction. Haymitch, and the rebels, they used us just as much as the Capitol did. But anyone who sees the interview is just going to get even more upset over all of this, over the injustice of separating me from the woman who is carrying my child." He wasn't necessarily wrong. Well, except for the one thing.

"She's not pregnant, is she?"

"Of course not. I haven't even… I mean… no," she could hear him blushing through the drainpipe. "She's not. We're not married either. We're not even really _together_."

"That's bullshit," she had seen them in the arena, the way they constantly watched each other, their complete and utter dedication to the other's survival. You couldn't fake that. At least not to someone as good at lying as Johanna was.

"You know that cousin back in Twelve?"

Oh. Of course he'd be caught up in this somehow. "I figured he wasn't a damn cousin."

"They're best friends, and I… well, I guess I'm probably dead anyway, but I was just assuming that I would die in the arena and she'd be with him. I think that's what she wants. Maybe. I can't tell. I guess it's the one thing about her I can't ever figure out."

"Was she with him before?"

"Before what?" Oh come on. Like there was ever any other kind of "before" in the life of a Victor.

"The Games, you idiot."

"No. Not really even afterwards. I mean, he kissed her once. Maybe more than that. I don't know," despite the fact that they were currently in prison, and Johanna was leaving tiny trails of blood all over the concrete, Peeta sounded like any normal seventeen-year-old kid.

"Yeah, well, he's pretty damn fine. She'd be an idiot not to notice. But in my experience, Katniss _is_ an idiot–"

"Are you trying to _help_?" he interrupted incredulously.

"Who got sliced up today? And who got a manicure? Just for your edification, because you sound pretty pathetic right now even though you probably should be counting your blessings, what I'm trying to say is that you're expecting a hell of a lot of emotional stability from someone who's been through a drastic experience. Trust me. It's confusing." Why was she sticking up for Katniss to a kid who was probably going to be tortured to death over the next few days? Weeks? Months? Well, the whole "going to be tortured to death" part was probably the answer. She really hoped it was days, if it was going to be anything.

"Why should I trust you? You didn't tell us about anything that was going to happen. You could have warned us, at least."

"Tell me this, Breadboy. How were you planning on killing me in the arena?"

He said nothing.

"Come on, kid. I know you must have had some kind of strategy."

His voice was quiet and sad when he responded, "I figured snapping your neck would be as quick and painless as I could possibly manage." Neck snapped by mild-mannered Peeta Mellark, who would probably weep as he did it. What a bizarre way to go.

"Fair enough," she casually responded. "So just keep that in mind when you're considering how you don't trust me. Or do. But I'm telling you honestly that whatever Katniss feels about you, it's on par, if not superior to, what she feels for ol' Gorgeous back home."

"You are probably the least comforting person ever," Peeta sighed, after a long pause.

"Why don't you cut yourself up a bit and see how sympathetic you feel?"

Peeta laughed. She didn't expect him to, but he did. She laughed too, or she tried until the pain from her ribs was too extreme.

"You sound like you know about all this from personal experience."

Johanna hissed. Laughing had opened up a lot of her wounds, and the blood was oozing all over the place. "Yeah, they just cut on me for several hours. It was _thrilling_, let me tell you," she grimaced.

"No, I mean about my situation. About Katniss." He was a perceptive one; she had to give him that.

"I don't wanna talk about it."

"If you didn't, you wouldn't have alluded to it." She wished she could see the kid so she could punch him in the face.

"Don't you have someone else you can talk to about your feelings?"

"We're in prison, Johanna. And even if we weren't… no. Well, other than maybe Haymitch, and he just likes to tell me what an idiot I am."

"He's not wrong."

Peeta ignored her and continued, "I had this friend, we grew up together, she was like a sister…"

"What is it with you people in Twelve and assigning familial relationships to your best friends? Can't you just be friends?"

"Like you and Finnick?"

"Exactly."

"I don't think you're just friends…" he said carefully.

"Finnick is in love with someone else," she snapped. "I don't have the capacity for love, period. So by all means, continue your boring story, but maybe just leave me out of it."

"Sure, of course. Whatever you want," Peeta responded, but she could tell that he was smiling, "So, my friend back in Twelve, Delly. I used to be able to talk to her about Katniss. She and my dad were the only ones who knew, though I think my brothers suspected. But after the Games… well…"

"No one knows what to say to you, and you don't know what to say to anyone."

"Yeah. That. It wasn't as bad for Katniss. She doesn't care about how people treat her and her family was just so happy to have her back. But mine… I don't know. They just started acting like I was different. Maybe I was. I ended up living in Victor's Village alone. My mother insisted that they continue to run the business like professionals, which meant staying at the bakery and Dad, well, he mostly just did what she said. I wonder what they think of me now."

"Everybody hated us in Seven," Johanna offered. "We kept leaving with their kids and not bringing them back alive. Made them think of things they'd rather forget." And they had. So much hatred. She remembered feeling it herself before she had been reaped.

They were quiet for some time. Johanna watched the beads of blood on her stomach slowly congeal.

Peeta's voice was hushed when he finally broke the silence. "That's why you hate Katniss, isn't it? Because she reminds you of things you want to forget?"

Johanna scoffed, "You're blinded by love, kid. She's just not that pleasant."

"Neither are you," he said kindly.

* * *

><p>Her days were all spent in the company of the man with the knife but Johanna grit her teeth and said nothing every time. With enough focus and dedication, the pain that she felt could be pushed down deep into a place where it turned into something different altogether. She felt a strange sort of gratitude for the people in the Diamond Awl. After seeing what they had done to each other, she knew that it was quite possible for a human to live through all kinds of mutilation, and this knowledge, coupled with her hatred for Snow, gave her the strength to survive.<p>

Peeta, on the other hand, was left in his cell completely alone for hours and hours. They took away his cards. They took away his chair, and his table, and his bed. The solitude and inactivity were slowly driving him out of his mind. Without companionship, he grew weary and irritable, even without doing anything to tire himself out. As someone who appreciated solitude, it was difficult for Johanna to relate, but there was no question that the edges of Peeta's sanity were slowly fraying. She could hear him at night, crying out for Katniss in his sleep, and then waking to nothing but his cell. Sometimes he wept. Other times, he would go into a mad rage, and she could hear the thuds of his hands as he punched the floor over and over and over again. She almost wished that they would hurt him, to give him something to think about.

When they returned her from the white room, the moment the floor shuddered as it stopped its descent he was immediately asking her question after question about the outside world, as though her tormentors were giving her regular updates on the state of the nation. When she couldn't gratify his desire for news, he'd often try to get her to talk about something else. He insisted that it was important for her to talk, to remember the reasons to stay alive. Johanna knew that he was trying to keep her from giving up, but at the same time, she was well aware that if she were gone, the strain of imprisonment would become even harder on the boy.

"I don't know, damnit," she moaned, lying almost senseless on the floor. She could barely remember the question he had just asked. Though she could withstand the pain, her body was becoming weaker and weaker with every passing day. Before every torture session, a medic would give her an IV of fluids and cover her old wounds with a sort of tight gel-like bandage that healed them almost immediately, but left the skin tender and sensitive. Forcing her body to heal so quickly was taking an enormous reserve of energy and the IV was not enough to keep her from feeling almost impossibly feeble. Her hair was starting to fall out.

"Tell me about Seven. What is it like?" He always did this, trying to get her to remember what her life had been before the Quell, before this prison. He didn't know how entwined memories of her home were with the things she tried so hard not to think about.

"I need to sleep, Peeta. I think I lost a quart of blood. The room is spinning. You've seen Seven anyway."

"Not like you have. Come on, Johanna. Please. It's important. Just tell me about one thing, one single thing you loved about it, and then you can sleep."

"The rain."

"What?"

"I loved the rain. It was soothing."

Peeta kept his promise. He let her sleep. But as she drifted off into uncomfortable slumber, she heard him softly say, "I wish so much I could make them stop hurting you, Johanna."

The Capitol was really, really good at torture, but it didn't always start right away. Johanna and Peeta had assumed this, but they hadn't really thought about the ways a person could be destroyed. If they had, perhaps they would have done things differently.

It was truly unfortunate that they were unaware of the microphone installed inside the drainpipe.


	21. Coin

**Oh hey. Two updates in one day. That's just how I roll. - sc**

* * *

><p>The next few days had been predictably nightmarish. When Gale and Thom arrived at the lake, there was a very makeshift field hospital set up by Mrs. Everdeen and Prim with the help of Gale's mother. The women worked tirelessly to try to heal the wounded, but many of the burns and other injuries were just too severe. Numerous townsfolk could do nothing but soak their loved ones in the soothing waters of the lake as they passed on. Screams of agony from both the dying and the survivors went on throughout the night.<p>

Those who were lucky enough to remain unhurt simply stood at the crest of a nearby hill and watched as Twelve burned to the ground. Fueled by the coal dust, the flames that rose from their home were so hot they glowed blue and white. There were about eight hundred refugees left. Only a third of these were Merchant, despite all Gale did. They had just been too close to the bombing. He hadn't gotten there in time.

Though the dried blood on his hands was his own, it felt like it belonged to Madge.

Just before dawn, Prim and Rory had cornered him. Prim scolded him about ignoring the blistering burn on his face, while she gently washed and dressed the wound with a poultice. "That was the easy part," she said sternly when she had finished. "Now we have to pop your shoulder back into place. We've already waited too long, and it's going to be very painful. Do you want something to put between your teeth? I've seen men bite through their own tongues once or twice."

"Just do it," Gale muttered.

Prim alone was not strong enough, so he had to sit on the ground while she explained to Rory how to reposition the joint in the socket. It took him three tries, and by the end, Gale's mouth was full of blood from gnawing through his cheek. He stood up and spat.

"I told you, biting on a stick could have kept that from happening," Prim tutted. From a bag at her side she pulled out a length of bandage and prepared to use it as a sling.

"Is that clean?" Gale asked.

She nodded, looking a bit confused.

"Save it for someone else. I'll just find some dirty rag. Doesn't have to be clean to hold up my arm."

Prim agreed, and then she turned quickly, heading back toward the triage area. Rory followed her, and just before he turned himself, Gale saw his brother reach out and wrap his arm around Katniss' sister's slim shoulders. The girl leaned into him heavily, full of exhaustion. Apparently the disaster had made his brother bold.

Not having the energy to focus on young love that hit just a bit too close to home, Gale instead concentrated on finding himself a sling. It didn't take long to locate something that worked, but as he stripped the shirt from a dead man who was lying abandoned by the lake, he couldn't help but wonder if maybe he was doing the dead a disservice. Muttering his thanks to the man, he closed his unseeing eyes as the sun came over the eastern mountain. Looking around, he realized that there was already a large pile of bodies around him, and there were going to be many more dead as people succumbed to their injuries. Something had to be done with them.

Now that the fires had died down, the inhabitants who had been watching the district burn were gathered by the shores of the lake. Many were just too shell-shocked, or wrapped up in grief to be of much good to anyone. Others were trying to help care for the wounded. Those who remained were beginning to look to him, as though they expected him to do or say something, but he wasn't really certain what. Was he supposed to be encouraging them? Telling them everything would be all right? Of course that was a lie. Over half the district was dead.

He might as well start with that.

Catching Thom's eye, he strode forward and stood on a stump so that everyone could see him. Gale had no idea how to make a speech, so he just started listing things.

"We have dead that need burying and eight hundred mouths that need food and shelter," he said in a loud voice. "I know the last part might seem the most important, but if we don't get rid of the bodies here, everyone's going to start getting sick. Now I know that every man here from the Seam can dig a hole, and I'm sure we'll need plenty of those. What I need to know though is who thinks he might know how to do something that can help us. I've got two bows, a fishing net, and a knife."

There was a collective gasp.

"That's _all_?" a woman shouted.

"Better than nothing," one of his friends, a younger Seam kid named Danl, said fiercely.

He had been trying to help, but Gale knew that Danl had actually made things worse when another man's voice cried out, "Just who put you in charge, anyway? You're nothing but a kid!"

Gale didn't really know what to say. He was taking charge because no one else seemed interested in stepping up and making sure things got done. It wasn't something he'd been longing to do, but it didn't seem like anyone else was willing, or even capable in their current situation. But how exactly was he supposed to argue that?

Luckily, he didn't have to say anything, because Thom strode forward into the crowd, stringing more words together at one time than Gale had ever heard him say in his life.

"I'd like to see anyone here who can handle things well as Gale. He's the one who got us all out here! He's the one who went back to town and tried to warn everyone. Saved all our lives, really. He's been in the mines, same as me, same as any man here. What's more, he knows these woods better'n anyone. He's been out here by himself since he was a kid, while the rest of ya were too damn scared of animals and the Capitol to go past the fence! So unless anyone else here knows how to use this net, those bows, or that knife, and where in these woods to find game, I suggest ya shut yer mouths and let him do what he does best!"

That shut everyone up well enough, although Gale could still see ripples of discontent that rolled through the crowd. It made sense. They had all just lost everything they had in a matter of minutes. Everyone was terrified. But he didn't have time to worry about how they felt. He just went with what made the most sense.

"We need different teams with different jobs. You know what you're capable of doing better than I am, so if I put you somewhere and you think you'd be better suited doing something else, I need you to…" he thought for a moment. They couldn't all be coming after him or Thom, the two people whom he knew could actually bring in food, with their problems. "I need you to talk to her." He pointed at the dirty-faced shoemaker's daughter, the one who had helped him get the first wave of townspeople to the Meadow. If she had managed to hold herself together then, he assumed she could continue to do so now. Unfortunately, he still didn't know her name.

"Delly," the girl volunteered, as though reading his mind. "Delly Cartwright."

"That's right. Any complaints go to Delly. She'll make sure you're doing the job you can do best. Now, let's see everyone who has some kind of survival ability. I need people who can tie knots, use weapons, skin game, scavenge for food, anything. If you know how to build things, we need you too." Up to this point, it sounded like everything he was saying was directed towards folk from the Seam, so he added, "If you ran a shop in town, I'm pretty certain you have a skill we can use."

And that was that. For the first time that anyone could remember, Seam and Merchant began to work together toward a common goal. A few brave folks went back to the burning remains of the town to see what kind of tools they could gather, specifically looking for shovels to bury the dead. Others, led by the town carpenter, began to make rough shelters for the wounded. Thom led groups into the forest to forage for food, while Gale, Rory and the few people they could find that knew how to hunt tried to bring down game. Greasy Sae made stew out of whatever they brought and stretched it as far as humanly possible. All the while, Mrs. Everdeen and Prim kept on tending the wounded and sick. He didn't think that Katniss' mother had slept since the night of the bombing.

Come to think of it, neither had he.

At least the weather was good, and even better than that, Delly Cartwright proved to be invaluable. She knew how to talk to people, how to soothe nerves, and she managed to get most of the more willful individuals to go along with whatever he said. Quite a few people, Seam and Merchant alike, considered their skills in survival much more valuable than they actually were in reality. Delly gave them pointless titles that meant nothing in actuality but calmed their egos and allowed Gale and Thom to make sure everyone was fed.

Well, actually, Thom did most of the feeding. With only two bows, and a noisy crowd nearby, the hunters had to go farther and farther away to try to find any game, and even when they did, it was never enough for everyone. Thom, though, knew all about plants, and managed to guide the foragers well enough that by the second day everyone had at least a little to eat. He wouldn't let people pull all of the katniss root out of the river, or eat all of the berries, though. He insisted things had to be left so they would grow for next year.

His decision made a lot of people angry, but the fact was, even if they dredged the lake, taking out all the fish and all the plants that filled it, and Gale and Rory both brought back the biggest buck they could find every day, there still would not be enough food to sustain even close to eight hundred people. Gale didn't know what to do. How was he supposed to decide who got to eat and who didn't? _Who_ was he, just barely nineteen, to make that kind of a decision? Who was anyone?

By early evening of the third day, he was quietly frantic. Orphaned children were beginning to suffer with no parents to make certain they were fed. The parents that remained were starting to hoard what little supplies they found. Foragers were eating things as they discovered them, instead of bringing them in for the group as a whole. A merchant woman had died because she ate something poisonous. Without any way to enforce the rules, Gale had no system to control the population with the intent to prevent disasters both small and large from happening. He didn't know how comfortable he would feel trying to do so anyway. He found himself wondering how the Capitol managed to do it.

Probably because they were a bunch of soulless, inhuman monsters.

He was sitting on the edge of the woods in a place where he couldn't easily be seen when Delly and Thom found him.

"We're a little worried, Gale," Delly started out diplomatically. She looked exhausted, and Gale figured she hadn't had much time to sleep either, or to even grieve the death of her parents. Thom said nothing, but the look in his face said as much as Delly's words had.

Gale unfolded his legs and stood up slowly, "I've been sitting here trying to decide who doesn't get food, and how I am going to tell those people that they get to go hungry for the foreseeable future. So yeah. I'm a little worried too."

Delly frowned. Thom grunted and looked at the ground. They were silent, and in their silence, Gale heard a mockingjay call out a warning.

The sort of warning he only ever heard before a hovercraft landed.

"We gotta go," he grunted, and without another word, he was sprinting toward the lake, Delly's "Gale, wait!" falling on deaf ears.

There were five of them that he could see, and possibly more on the way, but unlike the hoverplanes that had dropped bombs on the district, these ones were descending, probably bringing troops to finish off what was left of Twelve. Without stopping his stride, Gale leaned over and picked up Posy, who had been playing by the edge of the lake. She clung to his back, and he didn't even have to hold on. He ran on to the triage area where his mother, Mrs. Everdeen, Prim, and Vick were caring for more wounded. Vick was there because he had a fascination with disease, that had, in the past, frankly disturbed his older brother, but now he was grateful for it. With them all together, it would be easier to head deeper into the woods and run for it. Rory was there now, hunting, and Gale knew that his brother would be able to find them if he left the right signs. There was no way around it. Despite all he had done, the only way he could save his family would be if he got them as far away from this crowd as possible. He could come back and try to help everyone else later. His little brothers and sister came first.

"Come on, let's go!" he grabbed Mrs. Everdeen and pulled her away from the burned woman she was treating. "They're coming again; we have to get out of here."

The woman would not move. "I have patients. I'm not leaving, Gale."

"Neither am I," Prim put her hands on her hips defiantly.

Gale was furious, and he picked the girl up with his good arm and slung her over his shoulder. This made Posy giggle, but she stayed put on his back. "You damn well are coming, both of you. Now let's go."

There was the sound of a hovercraft bay opening, and Gale's mouth went dry. They were almost out of time. He glanced over his shoulder, dreading the sight of white Peacekeeper uniforms. Only, instead of white, the stiff-backed man who came out of the first hovercraft was wearing a drab gray jumpsuit. No Peacekeeper would be caught dead in something like that.

"Who's in charge here?" he called out in a commanding, but unthreatening voice.

Everyone looked at Gale. "He is!" someone shouted. Those who were standing between him and the hovercraft stepped back leaving a wide open path. There would be no running now.

Gale put Prim down and handed Posy to her. Thom and Delly, who had finally caught up with him, stood nearby, and Gale could hear Delly whisper, "Come _on_. We can't let him do this alone!" Gale gave his head an almost imperceptible shake, and he knew Thom understood enough to keep him, and hopefully Delly, from following.

With a look of unspeakable hatred in his eyes, Gale approached the hovercraft. Only, instead of the normal elaborate Capitol markings, this one was unadorned except for the number thirteen painted in a utilitarian script on a few strategically important locations.

The man before him was tall, with incredible posture, short gray hair, and dark blue, piercing eyes. He looked at Gale as intensely as Gale looked at him.

"You're in charge? You're just a kid," he finally said.

"Who the hell are you?" Gale demanded.

"Name's Boggs," the man said gruffly.

"You should know: these people aren't going to the Capitol. You're going to have to kill us first." Gale fingered the knife at his belt. He wasn't certain what he was going to do with it, but he wanted to be ready.

The man cracked a small smile, and it looked like he wasn't normally in the habit of doing so. "Well, I don't think we'd be very welcome there. Sorry to disappoint you."

Just then, from the interior of the hovercraft Gale heard a crashing sound and then a familiar voice shouting, "Damn it Boggs, just let me out there! They don't know who the hell you are, and Hawthorne's likely to kill you if he has a chance."

It was Haymitch Abernathy.

Even more surprisingly, he was sober.

At the sight of Gale, the drunk had only one thing to say.

"I need to see the Mellarks. Right now."

* * *

><p>Catnip was alive, but they wouldn't let him see her. Apparently, the realization that Peeta had been taken captive had driven her to the verge of madness. The damage to Haymitch's face stood as pretty convincing evidence that she was, at the very least, dangerous. No, Katniss was indisposed at the moment, which probably meant that she was drugged in the hospital somewhere in this underground warren where all of the refugees from Twelve were now comfortably ensconced. After the hovercraft ride, which even Gale had to admit had been a little exciting, if only for how happy it had made his little sister, he had been separated from his family and led to a place called "Command."<p>

Delly, Thom, and his family had all been issued quarters and sent there almost immediately. Haymitch was with the Everdeens, trying to explain to them what had happened in the arena. When the older man had been told that the Mellarks had been specifically targeted by the first bomb and were now all dead, he had fallen backwards with a dizziness that had absolutely nothing to do with drink. Gale wondered, though, if it wasn't for the better. He would certainly rather be dead than have to live with the knowledge that Rory, Vick, or Posy were locked deep within an impenetrable Capitol prison. As much as he resented Peeta, no one deserved that. And now the kid had literally no family left on this earth, except for the one that, Gale could only assume, the baker had made up for the cameras.

The girl from Seven, Johanna, he reminded himself to use her name, was being held captive too. This stung him for reasons he didn't quite understand. He had never even met the girl, only fantasized a bit (okay, maybe pretty constantly) about her when he had been young (and occasionally even now). He figured, based on how she had won her Games, that she had to be tough. Tougher than Mellark was, at any rate, but probably one of the toughest people out there. But… he could only imagine what they did to attractive young women in a Capitol prison. And he didn't want to imagine that.

Boggs was marching, because really, that's the only way his standard walk could be described, in front of him. Two more soldiers from Thirteen flanked Gale on either side. He felt like somewhat of a prisoner, despite the fact that he had heard the word, "hero" muttered several times by onlookers as he passed them in the tunnels. Finally, after weaving through what had to be miles of underground space, they reached a door and stopped. Boggs pushed in a code, which Gale memorized, proud of himself for thinking to do so. Until, of course, the grey-haired man leaned forward and gazed into a sort of hollow tube, which sent a red beam of light across his eye, scanning him.

Knowing just a code would be useless.

The door slid open soundlessly, and Gale was led into Command.

It was unlike anything he had ever seen. Screens with sophisticated liquid computer displays lined the walls. Soldiers manned them, running their fingers across the surfaces and executing commands with shapes made of light in a way that Gale had never even imagined possible. More traditional consoles with physical buttons lined the center rectangular table, and above it, a holographic map was projected. The contents of this single room probably cost more than the sum total of every single object that had ever been in Twelve since the Dark Days, including the high-speed train.

In the center of the room stood a woman who looked as though her hair and eyes had been sitting too long in the sun. They were the color of the side of a Seam house; one that had the paint left for so long that the light just eventually drains everything away, and leaves it a dingy grey instead of white. Her hair was unnaturally straight, smooth, and even. It made Gale a little uncomfortable. No person's hair could do that on its own. Realizing he had entered, she strode toward him slowly, deliberately, like a person who was used to holding power in every situation.

"Mr. Hawthorne," she said in a stern but placid voice that belied the hectic room around her. "I am Alma Coin, president of Thirteen. I am very, very pleased to meet the Hero of District Twelve."

Gale didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. It made him feel dirty to be called such a thing, visions of Madge's completely pointless death flashing before his eyes. Coin tilted her head expectantly, and when she was greeted with silence, her eyes lit up, as though he had agreeably surprised her.

"Sizing me up, I see. As well you should. I won't waste any time, then, and get right to the point. Mr. Hawthorne, I have a proposition to make, one that I think will benefit us both greatly if you accept."

"Okay. So tell me about it," he responded bluntly.

Coin sighed with pleasure and, despite her claim to not waste time, couldn't resist adding. "It's a great relief to have someone practical around after listening to Heavensbee chatter on and on for hours at a time." The delight in her voice died away, replaced by a businesslike tone, "My offer is this: I believe you would make a fine officer for Thirteen, and I would like to begin your training immediately."

This was one of the more ridiculous things he had ever heard. "You don't even know me. I'm not a soldier. And I don't live in Thirteen"

"First of all, Twelve is uninhabitable right now, so, for the foreseeable future, you do, in fact, live here. Secondly, Mr. Hawthorne, you underestimate yourself. Eight hundred people have you to thank for their lives. Boggs spoke to some of the Twelve residents during the recovery operation, they explained how you were single-handedly making sure everyone was fed."

"It wasn't just me, and we weren't, actually. People were going to starve. There wasn't enough food or enough time."

"And you were trying to figure out who those people would be, weren't you?"

Gale's glare answered her question for her.

"Leadership is full of difficult choices, Mr. Hawthorne. You've already proven that you are able to take charge in a dire situation, motivate those around you to action, sacrifice yourself for the good of the whole, and even that you were prepared to make the sort of decisions that would make you… unpopular. There is little else I could ever want or expect in an officer."

"So what's in it for me?"

"Other than a shining military career, the knowledge that your family is protected by an arsenal of nuclear warheads, and access to the most advanced weaponry that science can create?"

"I can keep my family safe on my own, thanks," he said with barely restrained fury. Once again, Coin tilted her head in surprise. Her gestures reminded him of a bird of prey. She approached him slowly, voice dropping to a whisper.

"Of that I have no question. But just how often have you fantasized about bringing down the Capitol, young man?" Gale did not respond; his flashing eyes said enough.

"How much would you give for the chance to do it?"

The time for laying low was apparently over.


	22. Keep Moving

_Hello long-suffering readers, for whom I have not provided an update in almost two months! I'm sorry. That's all I can say. I can also say that I have a few other following chapters nearly completed, so there won't be nearly so long between updates now._

_For those of you who are getting author alerts from me but have never read this, this is my other (first) story. It takes place in the same universe as all my other writing. Same characters, same everything, but it's a background view of the Games and the War from Johanna and Gale's perspective (though not POV). Sorry if that's not your thing, but I should have a The Grandmentor update next weekend? I'm at a conference where I can't really write, but this chapter has been nearly finished for weeks, so it didn't take as much to finish it and publish._

_-sc_

* * *

><p>After meeting Coin and begrudgingly agreeing to her terms, an unnamed soldier had stuck Gale's wrist under a strange machine that tattooed words on his wrist. Just like that he had been given a schedule, as though Coin had assumed he would agree and prepared for that eventuality. His first appointment was at the hospital for "processing." Like a hunk of coal. He hadn't been able to get a good look at the other items on his schedule because his arm had started to swell up after he read the first.<p>

The purple ink that Thirteen used had irritated Gale's weather-roughened skin to the point that he needed an injection to make the swollen rash go away. It was hardly the only shot he received, but it was the one that embarrassed him the most. After working in the mines, and hunting in the woods he never once had shown any signs of _sensitivity_. But the ink made him swell up like a balloon. He had attempted to reassure himself with the thought that even the mines had been natural in some way. Deep in the bowels of the earth, but from the earth nonetheless. This bright purple was as fabricated as Effie Trinket's hair. Maybe his body just rejected anything so _fake_.

But the soldiers who walked him to the hospital wing didn't know that, and they had chortled behind their hands when they saw him clawing at his wrist frantically.

"Well, there's just one more Soldier Hawthorne, and then you're good to go," said the doctor, a washed-out man whose honey-colored hairline had retreated far from its place of origin. Gale was sitting on a stainless steel table, feet dangling over the edge. His dirty mining shirt was crumpled up next to him so that the doctor could look at his injuries. The man had declared them well-tended, and asked who had done the healing. When Gale had told him about Prim and her mother, the doctor had been intrigued and said that he would be speaking with his supervisor about bringing them both on at the hospital.

"Nothing goes to waste in Thirteen, especially talent!" he had said cheerily.

Gale hadn't responded.

Now the doctor had his back to him, but it was clear that he was once more drawing some liquid from a vial into a syringe. When he turned around again, Gale could see that the fluid was a sickly yellow-green.

"What's this gonna keep me from getting?" he asked.

The doctor grinned, and it was moderately repulsive. "Girls pregnant," he said cheekily, walking forward syringe extended.

Holding up his hand, Gale leaned away from him. "Hold on just a minute. What exactly is that going to do?" Not getting diseases was one thing. This… was different. And maybe they just might want to ask before using it.

The doctor lowered his weapon, smug grin even larger. "Oh, you're concerned! I forget, you can't afford this sort of thing in Twelve," his tone made Gale clench his teeth in fury, but then he relaxed a little when the doctor went on, "And, of course, the Capitol is too dull to see the benefits of any sort of national health care, especially in the form of birth control." Of course they didn't. If people could choose when to have children, they could take the time to look at the world around them and maybe, just maybe, do something about their lot in life.

"It's not permanent," the doctor continued in what he probably imagined was a reassuring tone. "In fact, it can be instantly reversed with this," he picked up another vial, the liquid inside white with just a hint of blue, and shook it, "otherwise, you're free to fraternize with anyone you wish, free of any physical consequence. Everyone within Thirteen is inoculated against all sexually transmitted illnesses, so that's a non issue. Although child-rearing is _strongly _encouraged, officers are given a prophylactic shot as a matter of policy until such time as they decide to procreate. Having an unexpected family to care can be considered… distracting."

"Already have a family," Gale glared at the man, who was completely oblivious.

"Ah yes, of course, but our siblings are not the same as our children, are they?"

It was a choice between stabbing the man repeatedly with his own syringe or saying nothing. Gale took a deep breath and thought about all the food that Posy and Vick were getting, all the tesserae Rory was _not _signing up for. The fact that his mother, for the first time in her life, could have time for her hands to stay dry long enough to heal.

About Catnip somewhere in this same hospital.

He said nothing.

The man injected the liquid into his arm, and then stood back, admiring his handiwork.

"Well, Soldier Hawthorne, I do believe that you're free to go," he said

Gale's hand was on the door, when the doctor stopped him.

Shaking his head, laughing a little, he said, "Silly me, I almost forgot. You're to go to the H wing. The Mockingjay is waking up and they want you to speak to her."

"Who?"

"Oh sorry, I mean… Mrs. Mellark, I suppose her name is now? The Mockingjay is just our little nickname for her," he continued to chuckle.

It took a moment for the name to sink in. He felt sick at the sound of it, even though he was almost entirely certain it wasn't true. At the same time, a logical part of him respected the doctor. Mellark had claimed that he and Katniss had forgone the Capitol plans to get married in secret with the only ceremony that Twelve required. To this doctor, that was enough. What the Capitol said didn't matter.

Too conflicted to respond, Gale just nodded sharply and exited the exam room.

He knocked over at least three people on his way to the H wing. Like everything else in Thirteen, the physical organization of the underground hospital was obvious when you took the time to look at it, but there was a rigid sort of utilitarianism that seemed to crush the soul wherever you turned. As he ran, he briefly wondered how Thom was doing with all this. Not well, probably.

It couldn't necessarily be said that he reached the wing in record time. He had no basis of comparison. But it must have taken less time than expected, because he ran into Abernathy and _the_ Finnick Odair, of all people, talking in hushed voices in the middle of the corridor. The younger Victor was in a hospital gown, and he looked halfway mad.

"Let me go back for them," Odair was almost hysterical, even in whispers. "You can convince them to let me! You're the one who orchestrated all this, Haymitch. Please. They're _hurting _her."

Abernathy shook his head, "Snow's not going to hurt Annie until you're there to watch him do it, Finnick."

The young man's eyes were wild, "You don't _know_ that. There are ways to hurt that don't leave any marks. And what about Jo? Oh god, Jo…"

"We just have to hope she's tough enough to last," the older man muttered.

"And who's going to scrape whatever's left of her off the ground even if she is?" Gale asked, drawing their attention.

Finnick Odair was not as tall or imposing in real life as Gale had anticipated. In fact, he was a bit shorter than Gale himself was. Of course, it didn't help that the man from Four was hunched over, fingers madly twisting and knotting a bit of thin rope. His golden skin took on an almost greenish hue as the weight of Gale's words sunk in. Then, without another word, the greatest Victor alive was running as fast as he could down the hall, like a wild animal. Orderlies chased him with needles full of what were probably sedatives.

Haymitch looked at him with disgust, "And that, handsome, is exactly _not_ how you're going to talk to the girl."

"You figure she needs to be lied to some more? Thought you took care of that pretty well," Gale muttered bitterly.

"And if the kid dies, she can beat me to death for it. You can even hold me down while she does. But the he's not dead yet, and the only chance in hell we have of getting him out is by making certain that she can hold it together for a little while."

Gale shook his head in quiet fury. The man's duplicity was disgusting.

Abernathy grabbed his collar and yanked his head down, speaking in a harsh whisper, as though he didn't want anyone else around them to hear. "You and I both know that she'll be useless to anyone if that kid dies. Useless to the rebellion. Useless as a partner… lover… whatever the hell it is you want from her."

The younger man recoiled, whipping his head back, "This isn't about that. Katniss can and will do whatever the hell she wants. She doesn't love me right now anyway. After that arena… I dunno… she _might_ love Mellark… don't think she even knows."

"Love him or not, she knows what it means to _owe_ someone. And you can't really be more beholden to anyone than you are to the man who gets tortured or killed because his captor can't get to _you_." It was strange, but Gale suddenly realized that this man, this old, worthless drunk, probably knew Catnip better than she did herself. What's more, under all this bluster, he _cared_, maybe as much as he and Mellark both did.

"You get her strong, let her pull herself together enough to be the symbol of this rebellion that they want her to be, and then, when Thirteen realizes that they _need _her and she can't function with the kid in prison like that, then we'll get him out. Gale, you're the _only _person who can do that. The only person she trusts. She's likely to kill me as soon as she looks at me."

Gale nodded, teeth clenched, not missing the fact that this was the first time he had ever heard Haymitch call anyone by his first name.

"Tell her about Twelve. That will get her riled enough. But as far as the kid goes, don't tell her anything. You don't _know_ anything. Don't tell her that they've got him for the sole purpose of destroying her. She's not gonna realize at first. She'll think they want him for information, even if he doesn't have it. She's an idiot like that."

He was right. As much as it killed him, he was right.

"Cheer up, handsome. We get the kid back, you'll finally have a fighting chance."

He grit his teeth, his mild appreciation for the drunk evaporating. "It's not _about _that."

Haymitch shrugged. "I'm sure it isn't _all _about that. But I'm getting pretty damn sick of being the only one who's willing to be honest about this shit. I might lie, but at least I know what's going on. And we both know the same thing: long as that kid's gone like this, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell."

Gale ignored him, and pushed through the door into the hospital room.

Katniss lay on a bed, and he could tell by the way she moved, sluggish, deadened, that she had been sedated. Otherwise her eyes would have been on him as soon as he entered the room. She was thinner than she had been the last time he saw her in the arena. He stood at the side of her bed, not sure what to do. Not sure if she would wake enough to speak.

He was just about to reach his hand out to caress her cheek, when her eyes fluttered into focus.

"Gale…" she said in a croaked whisper. As she moved, a strand of hair fell into her eyes, and he leaned down to brush it away. Despite their familiarity, this sort of contact was not something he was used to doing with her. His fingers burned wherever they grazed her skin.

"Hey Catnip."

The touch seemed to rattle her somehow. Actually, he had completely forgotten about the burns on his face and his injured arm, so maybe it was that. Either way, she knew that something was terribly wrong. Her small, frantic gasp for her sister made his heart clench and swell at the same time. Prim was alive. He had made certain of that, as he always would.

_But what about Madge?_ a nagging voice insisted. _And everyone else, for that matter._ He pushed it away as he tried to explain what had happened to their home, neighbors, and friends in a way that would be both calming, like she needed, and honest, like she deserved. It felt like he was putting her out of her misery, but he kept on as the names _Bristel, Leevy, Michlan, Gareth… _and on and on rolled through his brain like a funeral march.

They made him leave the room when she began to wail miserably, and they sedated her once more.

In the emptiness of the hall, Gale found himself with nothing to do in a place that simply did not allow it. What was worse, he felt the most alone that he had ever felt in his life. Catnip was more lost than he had ever seen her, even more than the day of the Quell announcement when he had run to her frantically to beg her forgiveness, only to find her too drunk and despairing to even care. His family, with whom he had shared the struggle to survive and for whom he had solely existed were suddenly cared for. His entire crew was dead, with the exception of Thom. And the drunk was right. As long as Peeta Mellark was held captive, even if it was for the rest of their natural lives, Katniss would never be the same. It didn't even matter if she didn't want to be with _Gale _specifically. It was more than that. She wouldn't be able to function at all. Love wasn't even part of the equation at this point.

So obviously Gale was angry too, desperately so, but, much like Odair, there wasn't a thing he could do at this point. The doctors had been too distracted with calming Catnip down to tell him where he needed to go next, and the tattoos on his arm were still completely illegible. Abernathy had disappeared completely.

After wandering for what seemed like hours, he asked an orderly where the people from Twelve were being housed, and he was directed to a large section of the residential area, a honeycomb of doors so similar his head spun. Each compartment was labeled with the names of those who lived there. It looked as though they had kept families together for the most part; the odd person out was assigned a roommate. His own family was too large for one compartment, so he expected them to be split up. However, when he reached the area where they were located, he was surprised to see the names _H. Hawthorne_ and _P. Hawthorne _on one door, and _V. Hawthorne_ and _R. Hawthorne_ on another.

No _G. Hawthorne_ at all.

It made sense, he told himself, trying to crush the rather childish feeling of exclusion that surged into his heart. It made sense because he and Rory were both enormously tall, and there just wasn't enough space for that much _body_ in one compartment, even one designed for three people. It was even better this way, he insisted to himself, because Vick never shut up under the best of circumstances and now, in a place like this, the kid was bound to be unbearable.

But it still hurt like a son of a bitch. Like he wasn't part of his own family anymore.

He looked for his own name on another door, maybe with Thom, but Thom was roomed with someone named _H. Dalton_. Danl was roomed with another kid from Twelve, too. Even Delly's little brother, Lenny he thought his name might be, was with someone else. He couldn't find his name on any door.

It was as though Gale was no longer a part of Twelve at all.

At least at home, dark and horrible as the mines were, he had been able to keep his wits about him. He knew what he wanted. He knew how to work to stay afloat, until, of course, Thread had come and taken away one of three things left that made his life worth living. And then the Capitol had taken away the second when Katniss was reaped a second time. Love the baker or not, as long as they had him, they were still holding a part of her hostage.

His family was the only thing he had left, but now even they seemed out of his reach.

There was a sound of a nearby door opened, and then a bright voice broke through his dark thoughts.

Delly Cartwright had finally cleaned herself up, but her pale pudgy face seemed to look a lot worse in the unnatural light. Instead of the snarled ringlets that had been left to fend for themselves in the forest, her hair was braided and neat, the buttery yellow made harsh and almost fluorescent underground. She was slipping out of the room of individuals whose names Gale did not recognize, and she looked pleased with herself. So pleased, in fact, that he had a pretty good idea of what she had been doing in there, which was something he hadn't really expected from her. Of course, he didn't _really_ know the girl, other than as a person who was really nice, and incredibly useful in a pinch, so it wasn't quite fair to have any expectations at this point. Especially since she had just watched her own parents die in the explosion.

Everyone deals in their own way.

"I was looking for my room," Gale said, clearing his throat of all of the emotional effluvia that had been congesting it, trying to ignore what might be the extreme awkwardness of the situation.

Delly, though, didn't seem awkward at all as she eagerly offered, "Oh, they put you in the officer's barracks. It's really amazing that they're giving you so much responsibility so quickly! Not that you don't deserve it, of course."

"Yeah, 'amazing's' one way of putting it," he didn't want to offer up all of the other ways the situation could possibly be put. Sneaky. Controlling. Suspicious. Any of those would work.

Before he could stop her from touching him, Delly had lifted his wrist where his schedule was supposed to be, and then gave him a sympathetic look when she saw the slowly disappearing remnants of his rash.

"You too?" she tsk-ed. "Thom's is even worse. Everyone who worked in the mines is like this. They think it had to do with the coal dust in your pores reacting with the tattoo ink."

"Gave me a shot to make it go away."

Delly nodded, "Us too. A bunch of shots, really. Then they told me I could sleep with whoever I wanted without worrying about jenny warts." She laughed.

Gale did not join her, but she didn't seem to mind.

"Everyone's eating in the mess hall right now. I can show you where it is, if you want."

As they walked through the halls, Delly described how, in the short time since they had arrived, everyone from Twelve had been treated by a doctor ("processed" he corrected in his mind), assigned a room, and given a schedule. The children would go to school and begin basic military training. The adults, if they felt so inclined, could join the military themselves. Otherwise, they were given useful tasks to do based on their skill set.

"I'd obviously be an awful soldier, so they have me scheduled to work in one of the central administrative hubs when I'm not in school," she said excitedly. "A lot different than making shoes, that's for sure. They have to do a lot of work to make certain things runs smoothly, that everything gets done and nothing goes to waste. I'm not certain what I'll be doing, but it's bound to be interesting. Do you know that they had rooms assigned to us here before the hovercrafts even _landed_?"

It was all just too much.

"Your parents are _dead,_" he spat. "Two thirds of the district is _dead. _How the hell can you talk about administrative procedures?"

She took a little breath and then, for the third time in one day, Gale got to watch someone have a nervous breakdown. The second time he had caused it himself.

"Because if I don't, then I die too. I can't stop. I can't stop moving or I'll die," she squeaked pathetically. She was beginning to shake uncontrollably, the cheery, happy girl dissolving into a complete nervous wreck. The tremors wracked her body so hard they had to stop walking. Gale leaned her against the wall as she shook. They said nothing for a long time.

"My parents are dead, my little brother won't speak, and my best friend is probably being tortured as we stand here!" she coughed out through her tears. He winced at her words. For once, maybe for the first time in his entire life, he felt sincerely bad for someone that had the misfortune to be born Merchant.

"I have to do _something_," she continued hysterically. "This all has to mean something. This all has to be worth it. That maybe we can have a better life. I just have to believe that or I am going to _die_."

He cleared his throat. Emotions like this weren't exactly what he did, ever. Just powered through. No one ever even needed this from him, especially not a silly merchant girl who he barely knew. But Delly had managed to keep things together by the lake, and he owed this to her, to the girl who maybe was just as alone as he was.

"I know how you feel."

She looked up at him, shock and realization plain in her features.

"You _do _know, don't you? She's your best friend, and she's hurting too. And you lost your dad… you _understand_. You know how it feels. That you have to work, that you just can't stop. You have to keep moving too."

"I do," he nodded.

After few moments, she gave a giant, sniffle, and pushed herself away from the wall with what could only be described as bouncy resolve.

"Then let's get to work, Gale Hawthorne."

They found Thom, Rory, and Vick sitting at the end of a long table, digging into a pretty bland looking stew. Next to Thom was a man with ruddy brown hair, dark eyes, and skin that looked like he could have been from the Seam. His face was so weathered it was tough to tell exactly how old he was, but Gale guessed somewhere in his late twenties.

"Name's Dalton," the man said in a slow drawl, shaking Gale's hand vigorously. He had the strangest callouses Gale had ever seen, as though his hands had been repeatedly bound with rope. "Henry Dalton. Hail from the fair prairies of District Ten."

Gale didn't know what a prairie _was_, but he wasn't about to ask.

Posy and his mother were missing. Vick told him that their sister had thrown a fit because she wanted to go outside and was not allowed. For the second time in less than ten minutes, he found himself feeling a swell of empathy. It made it easy to ignore Vick's excited ramblings about the advanced technology in their rooms, the fact that there was a library full of books, and every other thing that Gale just did not give a damn about himself.

Finally interrupting the kid, Dalton spoke up through a mouthful of stew.

"So, I heard you're gonna be an officer here, Gale." He looked at him directly, as though he were trying to communicate some sort of serious message.

"Seems like it," Gale responded noncommittally, matching his gaze.

The man made long, mournful sucking sounds as he ate, but didn't turn his eyes away.

"Things ain't all they seem in this place," he smacked. "Jus' be careful."


End file.
